National cost savings, operational and safety benefits from use of magnetocardiography in the assessment of emergency department chest pain patients

Abstract

Study objectives

Patients frequently present to the emergency department (ED) with chest pain requiring further risk stratification. Traditional cardiac diagnostics such as stress testing may expose patients to ionizing radiation, may not be readily available, may take significant time for testing and interpretation, and adds cost to the workup. Magnetocardiography (MCG) is an alternative approach to assess candidates more quickly and efficiently than routine downstream testing.

Design

We created and ran 1000 trials of a Monte Carlo simulation. Using this simulation, we modeled the national annual impact by averting further cardiac diagnostics.

Setting

All EDs in the United States.

Participants

All ED adult patients with chest pain.

Interventions

Simulated use of MCG to reduce avoidable downstream cardiac diagnostics.

Main outcome measures

Our primary outcome was to estimate the impact of an MCG-first strategy on the annual national cost savings among eligible patients in the ED. Our secondary outcomes were the estimated reduction in short-stay hospitalizations, cancer cases, and cancer deaths due to radiation exposure.

Results

An MCG-first strategy was estimated to save a mean (±SD) of $574 million (±$175 million) by avoiding 555,000 (±93,000) downstream cardiac diagnostic tests. This resulted in a national annual cumulative decrease of 500,000 (±84,000) hospitalizations, 7,600,000 (±1,500,000) bed hours, 409 (±110) new cancer diagnoses, and 210 (±56) new cancer deaths due to radiation exposure from avoidable cardiac diagnostics.

Conclusions

If adopted widely and used consistently, an MCG-first strategy among eligible patients could yield substantial benefits by averting avoidable cardiac diagnostic testing.