A Clinical Audit of Transthoracic Echocardiography in Malaysia: A District Hospital Experience

Abstract

BACKGROUND Echocardiography is a very useful tool that is able to aid in the diagnosis of various cardiac diseases. Transthoracic echocardiography in particular provides important valuable cardiac information allowing the clinician to make crucial decisions. Requests for such procedures have been increasing steadily throughout the years. With the growing number of patients and need to handle imaging workload, we now examine the use of echocardiography in a single district hospital with limited resources. OBJECTIVE To evaluate and audit the usage of transthoracic echocardiography as an outpatient and inpatient basis. This was (12.2%), District Hospitals/Health Clinics (11.7%), Anaesthesiology (5.3%), Surgery (4.8%), Obstetrics & Gynaecology (3.3%) and the rest (8.3%). This particular audit indicates that there is room for improvement for the service. We would need to streamline the indications to reduce imaging burden as well as adopt a more pragmatic approach in request for echocardiography in our current setting.