Browsing by Subject "Hospital Units"

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    Care of the Patient with Chest Pain in the Observation Unit.
    (Emergency medicine clinics of North America, 2017-08) Borawski, Joseph B; Graff, Louis G; Limkakeng, Alexander T
    Care of the patient presenting to an emergency department (ED) with chest pain remains a common yet challenging aspect of emergency medicine. Acute coronary syndrome presents in nonspecific fashion. The development and evolution of the ED-based observation unit has helped to safely assess and diagnose those most at risk for an adverse cardiac event. Furthermore, there are several provocative testing modalities to help assess for coronary artery disease. This article serves to describe and discuss the modern ED-based observation unit approach to patients with chest pain and/or angina equivalents presenting to an ED.
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    Identification of chest pain patients appropriate for an emergency department observation unit.
    (Emergency medicine clinics of North America, 2001-02) Wilkinson, K; Severance, H
    There are no perfect tests or algorithms to exclude ACI. Because acute coronary occlusion often occurs in patients with low-grade coronary stenosis, the diagnostic goal of a chest pain diagnostic protocol is not to identify patients with CAD, but rather to identify patients who may be safely discharged home without the development of complications such as MI, unstable angina, death, shock, or CHF over the next 1 to 6 months. There is an advantage to evaluating patients at the time of their symptoms. Patients who have a small plaque that is ruptured, leading to intracoronary thrombosis and ischemia, will manifest ischemia on diagnostic testing that could missed in routine outpatient testing when their plaque were stable. The diagnosis and risk stratification of acute coronary ischemia in the ED depends on a careful history and interpretation of the ECG. Multiple regression models using readily available data (e.g., history, physical examination, and ECG) provide the best tools for risk stratification. If one is deciding how to select patients for an EDOU chest pain evaluation, diagnostic tools that have previously been tested and validated in this setting are preferable. These include the Multicenter Chest Pain Study derived tools (i.e., Goldman, Lee), the ACI and ACI-TIPI tools, and sestamibi risk stratification tools. This is not to say that other tools may not play a role at individual institutions. It is probably better to select a consistent approach and evaluate its performance, rather than to allow random variation to dictate practice. The future direction probably will involve standardization of the ED chest pain population. This allows outcome and cost-effectiveness comparative research of various strategies for patients with normal or nondiagnostic ECGs and normal biomarkers. Although this approach allows more precise stratification, the risk will never be zero, meaning that there will never be a substitute for good clinical judgment and close follow-up care.
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    Impact of renal dysfunction on acute coronary syndrome evaluation in observation unit patients.
    (Am J Emerg Med, 2010-07) Limkakeng, Alexander T; Chandra, Abhinav
    OBJECTIVES: The impact of renal disease on risk stratification of patients at low risk for potential acute coronary syndrome has not been well defined. The objective of this study was to document the prevalence of renal dysfunction and assess the association between renal impairment and abnormal cardiac evaluation in observation unit (OU) patients. METHODS: Retrospective cohort study at an academic medical center OU. Data were abstracted using predetermined definitions of data outcomes by trained abstractors. Patients had symptoms consistent with acute coronary syndrome and did not have obvious evidence of acute MI or ischemia on electrocardiogram, unstable vital signs, abnormal cardiac markers, serious arrhythmias, or uncontrollable chest pain. Observation patients received serial cardiac markers and electrocardiograms, with the majority receiving stress testing at treating physician discretion. Patients were stratified by glomerular filtration rates (GFR) at cut-off points of less than 60 and less than 90 mL/min per 1.73 m(2). Odds ratios were calculated for stress test findings of inducible ischemia or hospital admission. RESULTS: Five hundred and twenty-nine out of 545 patients had complete data and were enrolled. Sixty-nine (13%) patients had a GFR of less than 60 and 300 (56%) patients had a GFR of less than 90. An abnormal cardiac evaluation was found in 64 (12%) patients, of whom 31 (49%) had some renal impairment. The odds ratio of an abnormal cardiac evaluation with a GFR of less than 90 is 1.65 (95% confidence interval, 0.95-2.88) and 1.65 (95% confidence interval, 0.83-3.28) for GFR less than 60. CONCLUSIONS: Renal dysfunction is common in OU patients. In these patients, renal dysfunction did not confer higher risk for abnormal cardiac evaluation.
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    Thrombolysis in myocardial infarction risk score in an observation unit setting.
    (Crit Pathw Cardiol, 2013-09) Chavez, Jean; Srinivasan, Amudan; Ely, Sora; Drake, Weiying; Freeman, Debra; Borawski, Joseph; Chandra, Abhinav; Limkakeng, Alexander T
    OBJECTIVE: The Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction (TIMI) score is a validated tool for risk stratification of acute coronary syndrome. We hypothesized that the TIMI risk score would be able to risk stratify patients in observation unit for acute coronary syndrome. METHODS: STUDY DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study of consecutive adult patients placed in an urban academic hospital emergency department observation unit with an average annual census of 65,000 between 2004 and 2007. Exclusion criteria included elevated initial cardiac biomarkers, ST segment changes on ECG, unstable vital signs, or unstable arrhythmias. A composite of significant coronary artery disease (CAD) indicators, including diagnosis of myocardial infarction, percutaneous coronary intervention, coronary artery bypass surgery, or death within 30 days and 1 year, were abstracted via chart review and financial record query. The entire cohort was stratified by TIMI risk scores (0-7) and composite event rates with 95% confidence interval were calculated. RESULTS: In total 2228 patients were analyzed. Average age was 54.5 years, 42.0% were male. The overall median TIMI risk score was 1. Eighty (3.6%) patients had 30-day and 119 (5.3%) had 1-year CAD indicators. There was a trend toward increasing rate of composite CAD indicators at 30 days and 1 year with increasing TIMI score, ranging from a 1.2% event rate at 30 days and 1.9% at 1 year for TIMI score of 0 and 12.5% at 30 days and 21.4% at 1 year for TIMI ≥ 4. CONCLUSIONS: In an observation unit cohort, the TIMI risk score is able to risk stratify patients into low-, moderate-, and high-risk groups.
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    Utility of observation units for young emergency department chest pain patients.
    (Journal of Emergency Medicine, 2013-02) Ely, Sora; Chandra, Abhinav; Mani, Giselle; Drake, Weiying; Freeman, Debbie; Limkakeng, Alexander T
    BACKGROUND: Determining which patients presenting to the Emergency Department (ED) require further work-up for acute coronary syndrome (ACS) can be difficult. The utility of routine observation for cardiac testing in low-risk young adult patients has been questioned. STUDY OBJECTIVES: We investigated the rate of positive findings yielded by routine cardiac observation unit work-up in patients aged 40 years or younger. METHODS: This was a retrospective observational cohort study of patients aged 18-40 years who were evaluated for ACS in an ED-based observation unit. Data were collected by trained abstractors from electronic medical records. RESULTS: A total of 362 patients met inclusion criteria. Of those, 239 received stress testing, yielding five positive and nine indeterminate results. One other patient had acute troponin elevation while under observation. The positive stress test patients and troponin-elevated patient underwent cardiac angiography. Only one positive stress test patient showed significant coronary stenosis and received coronary interventions. In follow-up data, one patient had an adverse cardiac outcome within 1 year of index visit, but no coronary interventions. Thus, only 3 patients had adverse cardiac events, with only one patient warranting intervention discovered by observation unit stress testing and a second via serial cardiac markers. CONCLUSION: Routine observation of symptomatic young adults for ACS had low yield. Observation identified one patient with acute cardiac marker elevation and further stress testing identified only one patient with intervenable ACS, despite a high false-positive rate. This suggests that observation and stress testing should not be routinely performed in this demographic absent other high-risk features.