Is the bedside on-site ultrasonography for elderly patients with chest pain sufficiently performed?: focused on non-traumatic patients who visited EDs

ABSTRACT

Objective@#The bedside on-site ultrasound examination is a very useful diagnostic test for medically ill elderly emergency patients. However, it is not known whether it is being sufficiently used in the real world scenario. We investigated this aspect in patients with chest pain in two emergency departments in the Seoul metropolitan area. @*Methods@#Elderly patients with chest pain who visited the two emergency departments from January 2019 to December 2019 were recruited using the ‘cardiogenic pain’ code, which is the third step classification of the Korean Triage and Acuity Scale, and their medical records were reviewed to confirm whether an emergency physician-performed ultrasound prescription code was entered. @*Results@#Of the 744 elderly patients with chest pain, 66 were given bedside on-site ultrasound examinations. The rate of examination was 8.8%. Among the emergency departments, the local emergency departments accounted for 33 out of 389 patients (8.5%), and the regional emergency department accounted for 33 out of 355 (9.3%). @*Conclusion@#These results raise the need to check the extent of bedside on-site ultrasound examinations that are conducted in the initial care of medically ill emergency elderly patients nationwide.