Time is tissue — an ECG is often the pivotal diagnostic exam for a cardiac patient. This conversation explores how ECG management can expedite the process.
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Cardiologists know that when a patient experiences a myocardial infarction, "time is tissue." Quick response times and efficient care are critical to ensuring positive outcomes, yet many practices struggle to speed up their ECG processes.
Many facilities still use an outdated, slow, paper-based ECG process that is time- and labor-intensive, and can result in workflow backups. If you're struggling with this challenge, you may be dreaming of a better system that would allow you to expedite the entire workflow, enabling you to quickly obtain an ECG, accurately interpret it, and generate a report, with the added benefit of being able to share the data with colleagues so that they can provide the best patient care in a timely manner.
So how can these dreams be achieved? One practice envisioned such a system and implemented it to great effect. They adopted their Cardiology Information System with the goal of a 48-hour turnaround time for ECG interpretation and report generation so that every care team member would have access to the patient's cardiac data and could deliver the appropriate care rapidly. But they didn't want rapid ECGs at the expense of accuracy. In fact, they wanted to use digitization to avoid data entry errors that can come from manual entry of interpretations of corrections.
Well, you may be asking, what was their outcome? Not only did they meet these objectives, but they exceeded them by achieving a 24-hour turnaround. What's more, they had 100% physician usage, which enabled remote access to ECG data for the entire physician group.
The process was well adopted, and the doctors appreciated how it expedited the process by quickly capturing a digital ECG and transmitting it directly to the patient's electronic medical record, creating a single source of truth for each patient's cardiac information. Digitization also enabled remote access to the information, which means physicians could interpret the ECG quickly from any location without sacrificing accuracy.
So, what was the biggest impact? Perhaps the biggest win for this new process is that cardiologists can rapidly share ECG results with their non-cardiologist colleagues via the electronic medical record. Since patient data resides in a centralized management system, everyone on the care team can access the information to facilitate greater collaboration.
When rapid ECG results can improve cardiac outcomes, speeding up the ECG process is crucial. With a digital ECG management system, you can obtain ECG data even before the electrodes are removed from the chest. In addition to improving patient care, having this kind of process in place can make your work—and the work of your entire facility—more efficient and effective.
