A recent study led by Rahul Khare, MD, emergency department physician and assistant director of operations at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, sought to determine the cost-effectiveness of utilizing a CT scanner to evaluate low-risk chest pain patients in the emergency room. The study results which are published in the July issue of Academic Emergency Medicine show that using a 64-slice CT scanner is more cost-effective than the current standard of care for evaluating and diagnosing this patient population, which includes an overnight stay in the observation unit and cardiac stress testing.
Chest pain is the most common emergency department complaint in patients 50 years and older, and has a variety of potential causes. A commonly missed and difficult to diagnose cause of chest pain is coronary artery disease. "When patients arrive at the emergency department with chest pain, my goal as an emergency physician is to identify any life threatening conditions and treat the patient promptly. Currently it is a challenge to identify chest pain patients with significant coronary artery disease in a timely and cost-effective manner," says Dr. Khare, who is also an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.
source: Medical News Today
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