Chest Pain Admission Dilemma

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Hey guys here is an interesting article with actual patient oriented outcomes related to admission for chest pain.

Several take home points:

1. From highest quintile of admission rate to lowest (81% to 38%) the rate of MI and death went up by 3.6 per 1000 and 2.8 per thousand. This correlation implies that when you admit more patients you save lives.

2. It is VERY IMPORTANT to note the patient population. These are Medicare patients with average age of 71 years. So we ARE NOT talking about low risk chest pain ED patients.

3. Even though it looks impressive to save these lives, the NNT or number needed to admit to prevent one MI is 250 and to prevent one death is 333. Thats a lot of admissions. And admitting geriatric patients is often not a good thing for them. May be why the decrease in deaths is less than the decrease in MIs. They were dying because of a hospital acquired infection or deconditioning or something else.

4. It is striking to see how different the practice patterns are at different hospitals regarding admission of a fairly homogenous cohort of patients.

Appreciate any further comments.

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