During an American College of Emergency Physicians conference, Jonathan Slutzman, MD, of UMass Medical School said Americans have a total of nearly 130 million ER visits, with 5 percent accounting for patients with chest pain. Those patients are most expensive to treat because chest pain is a high-volume diagnosis and requires high-intensity treatment. Usually, chest pain requires blood tests, X-rays and sometimes CT scans and stress tests.
Emergency medical specialists are trying to identify best practices for evaluating chest pain. “This is on people’s radar screens, to try and ‘rightsize’ our care,” meaning that “we can safely treat many patients while doing less,” said Dr. Slutzman, according to the report.
Dr. Slutzman said more patients should be evaluated to see if they are having a heart attack without having to stay overnight in the hospital. Patients with chest pain are almost always kept overnight in the hospital for testing, “and a big subset of those people don’t really need it. One big key is more rapid access to outpatient providers. If someone can see their doctor in one to two days and maybe get some additional testing then, they can be safely discharged,” he said.
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