Affiliations
Department of Medicine, Stroger Hospital of Cook County and Rush Medical College, Chicago, Illinois
Given name(s)
Joseph K.
Family name
Asbury
Degrees
MD

Simulator Training of Future Hospitalists

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Training future hospitalists with simulators: A needed step toward accessible, expertly performed bedside procedures

Internal medicine residency programs, the major pipeline for incoming hospitalists, often provide little hands‐on experience in bedside procedures. Some residents may only insert 1 central venous catheter every 4 months on the general medicine wards,1 and others may gain little more experience during intensive care unit rotations. As seen in the survey presented by Grover et al.2 in this issue of the Journal, after 3 years of training in all types of patient care units, residents often count their accumulated experience on their fingers and toes. Such sparse experience hardly leads to expertise. Recognizing this pervasive lack of training the American Board of Internal Medicine narrowed its certification requirements for bedside procedures in 2006.3 Residents are no longer expected to perform bedside procedures but instead to know them. This important revision acknowledges that manual skills training should neither be assumed nor expendablecontinuing to do so is too risky.4 Yet as internal medicine residency programs focus their bedside procedure training on cognitive competence, the ongoing exodus of bedside procedures to the up‐market hands of subspecialists, surgeons, anesthesiologists, and interventional radiologists5 will likely accelerate.

But why should hospitalists disrupt this trend? Bedside procedures are common and not always conveniently needed during daytime hours. Roughly one‐tenth of general medicine inpatients receive a central venous catheter (CVC) insertion, a lumbar puncture, an abdominal paracentesis, or a thoracentesis.6 Among these patients, about one‐half will urgently need procedures during off‐hours. Outside of the emergency department, hospitalists will likely remain the only group of physicians available at the bedsides of general medicine inpatients 7 days a week, 24 hours per day. Thus, in developing our particular practice system to best serve our patients,7 we believe that hospitalists ought to remain principals in ensuring that inpatients have ready access to expertly performed bedside procedures.

Yet unfortunately, given the limited training in manual skills that today's internal medicine residents receive, hospitalists are increasingly less prepared to provide this access themselves.8 State‐of‐the‐art training methods developed by medical specialties that depend largely on manual skills provide promising potential solutions for both future and practicing hospitalists.9 In particular, patient simulators can provide trainees with the essential hands‐on experience they often lack. In contrast to the ad hoc see‐one, do‐one, teach‐one method in current widespread use, training with simulators has distinct advantages. First, simulators obviate the increasingly awkward consent as patients grow savvier about safety concerns and (understandably) less tolerant of a novice's need to acquire experience.10 Second, training with simulators is controlled so that anatomic variations, comorbidities, patient discomfort, and time pressuresthough important real‐world factorscan be artificially removed in the earlier cognitive and integrative stages of training.11 Third, immediate feedback, which at the bedside of real patients is often empathetically avoided or delivered in cryptic hand signals, can be unmistakably unmuted and honest in the simulator setting. Fourth, and most important to the development of expertise, simulators can be used repeatedly, allowing trainees first to become facile in the mechanics of their performance (eg, holding an ultrasound probe for real‐time guidance or knowing how it feels to enter a vein) before attempting a procedure on a patient.

Three examples of patient simulators used to train internal medicine residents in CVC insertion are presented in this issue of the Journal.1214 Using observers who adhered to objective, a priori assessment criteria, both Rosen et al.13 and Millington et al.14 carefully demonstrate that internal medicine residents' manual skills can improve with patient simulators. Given the understood importance of hands‐on experience in manual skills training,15 these anticipated findings are important validations of simulator theory. The work by Barsuk et al.12 goes further to begin to examine whether or not simulator training actually leads to improved patient outcomesthe holy grail of such research. In this observational study, compared to residents who did not undergo simulator training, those who did undergo such training had 1 fewer needle passes during successful CVC insertions. Given the relative infrequency of periprocedural complications, this study was understandably underpowered to measure true complications, relying instead on the often‐used surrogate of needle passes. Nonetheless, this work will serve as an important initial example of why simulator training may be worth the effort.

To direct participation in simulator training, we endorse selecting trainees who will perform bedside procedures in their future practice.16 Given the trend in manual skills training among internal medicine residency training programs, hospitalist programs may need to shoulder this effort themselves. Thankfully, simulator training need not be expensive. Based on transfer‐of‐learning research,17 the fidelity of the simulator is less important than the accumulated experience it can afford. Even low‐fidelity simulators, such as the store‐bought whole chicken used by Rosen et al.,13 may preserve trainees' manual skills just as effectively as the expensive, bionic, high‐fidelity simulators used by Barsuk et al.12 and Millington et al.14

Beyond the costs of training, however, hospital administrators and hospitalist group leaders have more complex externalities and opportunity costs to weigh when evaluating which physician groups should perform bedside procedures. The intuitively lower‐cost strategy for hospitals, we believe, would be to ask hospitalists to perform bedside procedures at patients' bedsides instead of asking, say, highly‐paid interventional radiologists to perform the same procedures in fully‐staffed fluoroscopy suites. There is, however, very little research to help inform these decisions. As hospitalists, we know firsthand that modern healthcare remuneration is based more on doing than on knowing. Yet, whether or not bedside procedures afford financial incentives for hospitalists is unclearmuch will depend on local factors. Regardless of the finances, we believe that hospitalists skilled in performing common bedside procedures can improve the quality and efficiency of care delivery at patients' bedsides. So, instead of a call to arms for yet another turf battle, let's continue development of state‐of‐the‐art training methods like simulators to ensure that future hospitalists can expertly perform bedside procedures. After all, fighting for improvements in patient safety is a battle that we hospitalists know how to win.

References
  1. Miranda JA,Trick WE,Evans AT,Charles‐Damte M,Reilly BM,Clarke P.Firm‐based trial to improve central venous catheter insertion practices.J Hosp Med.2007;2:135142.
  2. Grover S,Currier P,Elinoff J,Mouchantaf K,Katz J,McMahon G.Development of a test to evaluate residents' knowledge of medical procedures.J Hosp Med.2009;XX:XXXXXX.
  3. American Board of Internal Medicine. Policies and procedures for certification, May 2009. Available at: http://www.abim.org/default.aspx; Accessed August2009.
  4. Fincher RM.Procedural competence of internal medicine residents: time to address the gap.J Gen Intern Med.2000;15:432433.
  5. Wigton RS,Alguire P.The declining number and variety of procedures done by general internists: a resurvey of members of the American College of Physicians.Ann Intern Med.2007;146:355360.
  6. Lucas BP,Asbury JK,Wang Y, et al.Impact of a bedside procedure service on general medicine inpatients: a firm‐based trial.J Hosp Med.2006;2:143149.
  7. Duffy FD,Holmboe ES.What procedures should internists do?Ann Intern Med.2007;146:392394.
  8. Huang GC,Smith CC,Gordon CE, et al.Beyond the comfort zone: residents assess their comfort performing inpatient medical procedures.Am J Med.2006;119:71.e17e24
  9. Reznick RK,MacRae H.Teaching surgical skills—changes in the wind.N Engl J Med.2006;355:26642669.
  10. Santen SA,Hemphill RR,McDonald MF,Jo CO.Patients' willingness to allow residents to learn to practice medical procedures.Acad Med.2004;79:144147.
  11. Fitts PM,Posner MI.Human performance.Belmont, CA:Brooks/Cole;1967.
  12. Barsuk J,McGaghie W,Cohen E,Balachandran J,Wayne D.Use of simulation‐based mastery learning to improve the quality of central venous catheter placement in a medical intensive care unit.J Hosp Med.2009;4(7):397403.
  13. Rosen BT,Uddin PQ,Harrington AR,Ault BW,Ault MJ.Does personalized vascular access training on a non‐human tissue model allow for learning and retention of central line placement skills? Phase II of the procedural patient safety initiative (PPSI‐II).J Hosp Med.2009;4(7):423429.
  14. Millington S,Wong R,Kassen B,Roberts J,Ma I.Improving internal medicine residents' performance, knowledge, and confidence in central venous catheterization using simulators.J Hosp Med.2009;4(7):410414.
  15. Ericsson KA,Charness N,Feltovich PJ,Hoffman RR.The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance.New York, NY:Cambridge University Press;2006.
  16. Wayne DB,Barsuk JH,McGaghie WC.Procedural training at a crossroads: striking a balance between education, patient safety, and quality.J Hosp Med.2007;2:123125.
  17. Grober ED,Hamstra SJ,Wanzel KR, et al.The educational impact of bench model fidelity on the acquisition of technical skill: the use of clinically relevant outcome measures.Ann Surg.2004;240:374381.
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Internal medicine residency programs, the major pipeline for incoming hospitalists, often provide little hands‐on experience in bedside procedures. Some residents may only insert 1 central venous catheter every 4 months on the general medicine wards,1 and others may gain little more experience during intensive care unit rotations. As seen in the survey presented by Grover et al.2 in this issue of the Journal, after 3 years of training in all types of patient care units, residents often count their accumulated experience on their fingers and toes. Such sparse experience hardly leads to expertise. Recognizing this pervasive lack of training the American Board of Internal Medicine narrowed its certification requirements for bedside procedures in 2006.3 Residents are no longer expected to perform bedside procedures but instead to know them. This important revision acknowledges that manual skills training should neither be assumed nor expendablecontinuing to do so is too risky.4 Yet as internal medicine residency programs focus their bedside procedure training on cognitive competence, the ongoing exodus of bedside procedures to the up‐market hands of subspecialists, surgeons, anesthesiologists, and interventional radiologists5 will likely accelerate.

But why should hospitalists disrupt this trend? Bedside procedures are common and not always conveniently needed during daytime hours. Roughly one‐tenth of general medicine inpatients receive a central venous catheter (CVC) insertion, a lumbar puncture, an abdominal paracentesis, or a thoracentesis.6 Among these patients, about one‐half will urgently need procedures during off‐hours. Outside of the emergency department, hospitalists will likely remain the only group of physicians available at the bedsides of general medicine inpatients 7 days a week, 24 hours per day. Thus, in developing our particular practice system to best serve our patients,7 we believe that hospitalists ought to remain principals in ensuring that inpatients have ready access to expertly performed bedside procedures.

Yet unfortunately, given the limited training in manual skills that today's internal medicine residents receive, hospitalists are increasingly less prepared to provide this access themselves.8 State‐of‐the‐art training methods developed by medical specialties that depend largely on manual skills provide promising potential solutions for both future and practicing hospitalists.9 In particular, patient simulators can provide trainees with the essential hands‐on experience they often lack. In contrast to the ad hoc see‐one, do‐one, teach‐one method in current widespread use, training with simulators has distinct advantages. First, simulators obviate the increasingly awkward consent as patients grow savvier about safety concerns and (understandably) less tolerant of a novice's need to acquire experience.10 Second, training with simulators is controlled so that anatomic variations, comorbidities, patient discomfort, and time pressuresthough important real‐world factorscan be artificially removed in the earlier cognitive and integrative stages of training.11 Third, immediate feedback, which at the bedside of real patients is often empathetically avoided or delivered in cryptic hand signals, can be unmistakably unmuted and honest in the simulator setting. Fourth, and most important to the development of expertise, simulators can be used repeatedly, allowing trainees first to become facile in the mechanics of their performance (eg, holding an ultrasound probe for real‐time guidance or knowing how it feels to enter a vein) before attempting a procedure on a patient.

Three examples of patient simulators used to train internal medicine residents in CVC insertion are presented in this issue of the Journal.1214 Using observers who adhered to objective, a priori assessment criteria, both Rosen et al.13 and Millington et al.14 carefully demonstrate that internal medicine residents' manual skills can improve with patient simulators. Given the understood importance of hands‐on experience in manual skills training,15 these anticipated findings are important validations of simulator theory. The work by Barsuk et al.12 goes further to begin to examine whether or not simulator training actually leads to improved patient outcomesthe holy grail of such research. In this observational study, compared to residents who did not undergo simulator training, those who did undergo such training had 1 fewer needle passes during successful CVC insertions. Given the relative infrequency of periprocedural complications, this study was understandably underpowered to measure true complications, relying instead on the often‐used surrogate of needle passes. Nonetheless, this work will serve as an important initial example of why simulator training may be worth the effort.

To direct participation in simulator training, we endorse selecting trainees who will perform bedside procedures in their future practice.16 Given the trend in manual skills training among internal medicine residency training programs, hospitalist programs may need to shoulder this effort themselves. Thankfully, simulator training need not be expensive. Based on transfer‐of‐learning research,17 the fidelity of the simulator is less important than the accumulated experience it can afford. Even low‐fidelity simulators, such as the store‐bought whole chicken used by Rosen et al.,13 may preserve trainees' manual skills just as effectively as the expensive, bionic, high‐fidelity simulators used by Barsuk et al.12 and Millington et al.14

Beyond the costs of training, however, hospital administrators and hospitalist group leaders have more complex externalities and opportunity costs to weigh when evaluating which physician groups should perform bedside procedures. The intuitively lower‐cost strategy for hospitals, we believe, would be to ask hospitalists to perform bedside procedures at patients' bedsides instead of asking, say, highly‐paid interventional radiologists to perform the same procedures in fully‐staffed fluoroscopy suites. There is, however, very little research to help inform these decisions. As hospitalists, we know firsthand that modern healthcare remuneration is based more on doing than on knowing. Yet, whether or not bedside procedures afford financial incentives for hospitalists is unclearmuch will depend on local factors. Regardless of the finances, we believe that hospitalists skilled in performing common bedside procedures can improve the quality and efficiency of care delivery at patients' bedsides. So, instead of a call to arms for yet another turf battle, let's continue development of state‐of‐the‐art training methods like simulators to ensure that future hospitalists can expertly perform bedside procedures. After all, fighting for improvements in patient safety is a battle that we hospitalists know how to win.

Internal medicine residency programs, the major pipeline for incoming hospitalists, often provide little hands‐on experience in bedside procedures. Some residents may only insert 1 central venous catheter every 4 months on the general medicine wards,1 and others may gain little more experience during intensive care unit rotations. As seen in the survey presented by Grover et al.2 in this issue of the Journal, after 3 years of training in all types of patient care units, residents often count their accumulated experience on their fingers and toes. Such sparse experience hardly leads to expertise. Recognizing this pervasive lack of training the American Board of Internal Medicine narrowed its certification requirements for bedside procedures in 2006.3 Residents are no longer expected to perform bedside procedures but instead to know them. This important revision acknowledges that manual skills training should neither be assumed nor expendablecontinuing to do so is too risky.4 Yet as internal medicine residency programs focus their bedside procedure training on cognitive competence, the ongoing exodus of bedside procedures to the up‐market hands of subspecialists, surgeons, anesthesiologists, and interventional radiologists5 will likely accelerate.

But why should hospitalists disrupt this trend? Bedside procedures are common and not always conveniently needed during daytime hours. Roughly one‐tenth of general medicine inpatients receive a central venous catheter (CVC) insertion, a lumbar puncture, an abdominal paracentesis, or a thoracentesis.6 Among these patients, about one‐half will urgently need procedures during off‐hours. Outside of the emergency department, hospitalists will likely remain the only group of physicians available at the bedsides of general medicine inpatients 7 days a week, 24 hours per day. Thus, in developing our particular practice system to best serve our patients,7 we believe that hospitalists ought to remain principals in ensuring that inpatients have ready access to expertly performed bedside procedures.

Yet unfortunately, given the limited training in manual skills that today's internal medicine residents receive, hospitalists are increasingly less prepared to provide this access themselves.8 State‐of‐the‐art training methods developed by medical specialties that depend largely on manual skills provide promising potential solutions for both future and practicing hospitalists.9 In particular, patient simulators can provide trainees with the essential hands‐on experience they often lack. In contrast to the ad hoc see‐one, do‐one, teach‐one method in current widespread use, training with simulators has distinct advantages. First, simulators obviate the increasingly awkward consent as patients grow savvier about safety concerns and (understandably) less tolerant of a novice's need to acquire experience.10 Second, training with simulators is controlled so that anatomic variations, comorbidities, patient discomfort, and time pressuresthough important real‐world factorscan be artificially removed in the earlier cognitive and integrative stages of training.11 Third, immediate feedback, which at the bedside of real patients is often empathetically avoided or delivered in cryptic hand signals, can be unmistakably unmuted and honest in the simulator setting. Fourth, and most important to the development of expertise, simulators can be used repeatedly, allowing trainees first to become facile in the mechanics of their performance (eg, holding an ultrasound probe for real‐time guidance or knowing how it feels to enter a vein) before attempting a procedure on a patient.

Three examples of patient simulators used to train internal medicine residents in CVC insertion are presented in this issue of the Journal.1214 Using observers who adhered to objective, a priori assessment criteria, both Rosen et al.13 and Millington et al.14 carefully demonstrate that internal medicine residents' manual skills can improve with patient simulators. Given the understood importance of hands‐on experience in manual skills training,15 these anticipated findings are important validations of simulator theory. The work by Barsuk et al.12 goes further to begin to examine whether or not simulator training actually leads to improved patient outcomesthe holy grail of such research. In this observational study, compared to residents who did not undergo simulator training, those who did undergo such training had 1 fewer needle passes during successful CVC insertions. Given the relative infrequency of periprocedural complications, this study was understandably underpowered to measure true complications, relying instead on the often‐used surrogate of needle passes. Nonetheless, this work will serve as an important initial example of why simulator training may be worth the effort.

To direct participation in simulator training, we endorse selecting trainees who will perform bedside procedures in their future practice.16 Given the trend in manual skills training among internal medicine residency training programs, hospitalist programs may need to shoulder this effort themselves. Thankfully, simulator training need not be expensive. Based on transfer‐of‐learning research,17 the fidelity of the simulator is less important than the accumulated experience it can afford. Even low‐fidelity simulators, such as the store‐bought whole chicken used by Rosen et al.,13 may preserve trainees' manual skills just as effectively as the expensive, bionic, high‐fidelity simulators used by Barsuk et al.12 and Millington et al.14

Beyond the costs of training, however, hospital administrators and hospitalist group leaders have more complex externalities and opportunity costs to weigh when evaluating which physician groups should perform bedside procedures. The intuitively lower‐cost strategy for hospitals, we believe, would be to ask hospitalists to perform bedside procedures at patients' bedsides instead of asking, say, highly‐paid interventional radiologists to perform the same procedures in fully‐staffed fluoroscopy suites. There is, however, very little research to help inform these decisions. As hospitalists, we know firsthand that modern healthcare remuneration is based more on doing than on knowing. Yet, whether or not bedside procedures afford financial incentives for hospitalists is unclearmuch will depend on local factors. Regardless of the finances, we believe that hospitalists skilled in performing common bedside procedures can improve the quality and efficiency of care delivery at patients' bedsides. So, instead of a call to arms for yet another turf battle, let's continue development of state‐of‐the‐art training methods like simulators to ensure that future hospitalists can expertly perform bedside procedures. After all, fighting for improvements in patient safety is a battle that we hospitalists know how to win.

References
  1. Miranda JA,Trick WE,Evans AT,Charles‐Damte M,Reilly BM,Clarke P.Firm‐based trial to improve central venous catheter insertion practices.J Hosp Med.2007;2:135142.
  2. Grover S,Currier P,Elinoff J,Mouchantaf K,Katz J,McMahon G.Development of a test to evaluate residents' knowledge of medical procedures.J Hosp Med.2009;XX:XXXXXX.
  3. American Board of Internal Medicine. Policies and procedures for certification, May 2009. Available at: http://www.abim.org/default.aspx; Accessed August2009.
  4. Fincher RM.Procedural competence of internal medicine residents: time to address the gap.J Gen Intern Med.2000;15:432433.
  5. Wigton RS,Alguire P.The declining number and variety of procedures done by general internists: a resurvey of members of the American College of Physicians.Ann Intern Med.2007;146:355360.
  6. Lucas BP,Asbury JK,Wang Y, et al.Impact of a bedside procedure service on general medicine inpatients: a firm‐based trial.J Hosp Med.2006;2:143149.
  7. Duffy FD,Holmboe ES.What procedures should internists do?Ann Intern Med.2007;146:392394.
  8. Huang GC,Smith CC,Gordon CE, et al.Beyond the comfort zone: residents assess their comfort performing inpatient medical procedures.Am J Med.2006;119:71.e17e24
  9. Reznick RK,MacRae H.Teaching surgical skills—changes in the wind.N Engl J Med.2006;355:26642669.
  10. Santen SA,Hemphill RR,McDonald MF,Jo CO.Patients' willingness to allow residents to learn to practice medical procedures.Acad Med.2004;79:144147.
  11. Fitts PM,Posner MI.Human performance.Belmont, CA:Brooks/Cole;1967.
  12. Barsuk J,McGaghie W,Cohen E,Balachandran J,Wayne D.Use of simulation‐based mastery learning to improve the quality of central venous catheter placement in a medical intensive care unit.J Hosp Med.2009;4(7):397403.
  13. Rosen BT,Uddin PQ,Harrington AR,Ault BW,Ault MJ.Does personalized vascular access training on a non‐human tissue model allow for learning and retention of central line placement skills? Phase II of the procedural patient safety initiative (PPSI‐II).J Hosp Med.2009;4(7):423429.
  14. Millington S,Wong R,Kassen B,Roberts J,Ma I.Improving internal medicine residents' performance, knowledge, and confidence in central venous catheterization using simulators.J Hosp Med.2009;4(7):410414.
  15. Ericsson KA,Charness N,Feltovich PJ,Hoffman RR.The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance.New York, NY:Cambridge University Press;2006.
  16. Wayne DB,Barsuk JH,McGaghie WC.Procedural training at a crossroads: striking a balance between education, patient safety, and quality.J Hosp Med.2007;2:123125.
  17. Grober ED,Hamstra SJ,Wanzel KR, et al.The educational impact of bench model fidelity on the acquisition of technical skill: the use of clinically relevant outcome measures.Ann Surg.2004;240:374381.
References
  1. Miranda JA,Trick WE,Evans AT,Charles‐Damte M,Reilly BM,Clarke P.Firm‐based trial to improve central venous catheter insertion practices.J Hosp Med.2007;2:135142.
  2. Grover S,Currier P,Elinoff J,Mouchantaf K,Katz J,McMahon G.Development of a test to evaluate residents' knowledge of medical procedures.J Hosp Med.2009;XX:XXXXXX.
  3. American Board of Internal Medicine. Policies and procedures for certification, May 2009. Available at: http://www.abim.org/default.aspx; Accessed August2009.
  4. Fincher RM.Procedural competence of internal medicine residents: time to address the gap.J Gen Intern Med.2000;15:432433.
  5. Wigton RS,Alguire P.The declining number and variety of procedures done by general internists: a resurvey of members of the American College of Physicians.Ann Intern Med.2007;146:355360.
  6. Lucas BP,Asbury JK,Wang Y, et al.Impact of a bedside procedure service on general medicine inpatients: a firm‐based trial.J Hosp Med.2006;2:143149.
  7. Duffy FD,Holmboe ES.What procedures should internists do?Ann Intern Med.2007;146:392394.
  8. Huang GC,Smith CC,Gordon CE, et al.Beyond the comfort zone: residents assess their comfort performing inpatient medical procedures.Am J Med.2006;119:71.e17e24
  9. Reznick RK,MacRae H.Teaching surgical skills—changes in the wind.N Engl J Med.2006;355:26642669.
  10. Santen SA,Hemphill RR,McDonald MF,Jo CO.Patients' willingness to allow residents to learn to practice medical procedures.Acad Med.2004;79:144147.
  11. Fitts PM,Posner MI.Human performance.Belmont, CA:Brooks/Cole;1967.
  12. Barsuk J,McGaghie W,Cohen E,Balachandran J,Wayne D.Use of simulation‐based mastery learning to improve the quality of central venous catheter placement in a medical intensive care unit.J Hosp Med.2009;4(7):397403.
  13. Rosen BT,Uddin PQ,Harrington AR,Ault BW,Ault MJ.Does personalized vascular access training on a non‐human tissue model allow for learning and retention of central line placement skills? Phase II of the procedural patient safety initiative (PPSI‐II).J Hosp Med.2009;4(7):423429.
  14. Millington S,Wong R,Kassen B,Roberts J,Ma I.Improving internal medicine residents' performance, knowledge, and confidence in central venous catheterization using simulators.J Hosp Med.2009;4(7):410414.
  15. Ericsson KA,Charness N,Feltovich PJ,Hoffman RR.The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance.New York, NY:Cambridge University Press;2006.
  16. Wayne DB,Barsuk JH,McGaghie WC.Procedural training at a crossroads: striking a balance between education, patient safety, and quality.J Hosp Med.2007;2:123125.
  17. Grober ED,Hamstra SJ,Wanzel KR, et al.The educational impact of bench model fidelity on the acquisition of technical skill: the use of clinically relevant outcome measures.Ann Surg.2004;240:374381.
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Training future hospitalists with simulators: A needed step toward accessible, expertly performed bedside procedures
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Accuracy of Hospitalist‐Performed HCUE

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Diagnostic accuracy of hospitalist‐performed hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography after a brief training program

Hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography (HCUE) can help noncardiologists answer well‐defined questions at patients' bedsides in less than 10 minutes.1, 2 Indeed, intensivists3 and emergency department physicians4 already use HCUE to make rapid, point‐of‐care assessments. Since cardiovascular diagnoses are common among general medicine inpatients, HCUE may become an important skill for hospitalists to learn.5

However, uncertainty exists about the duration of HCUE training for hospitalists. In 2002, experts from the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) published recommendations on training requirements for HCUE.6 With limited data on the safety or performance of HCUE training programs, which had just begun to emerge, the ASE borrowed from the proven training recommendations for standard echocardiography (SE). They recommended that all HCUE trainees, cardiologist and noncardiologist alike, complete level 1 SE training: 75 personally‐performed and 150 personally‐interpreted echocardiographic examinations. Since then, however, several HCUE training programs designed for noncardiologists have emerged.2, 5, 710 These alternative programs suggest that the ASE's recommended duration of training may be too long, particularly for focused HCUE that is limited to a few relatively simple assessments. It is important not to overshoot the requirements of HCUE training, because doing so may discourage groups of noncardiologists, like hospitalists, who may derive great benefits from HCUE.11

To address this uncertainty for hospitalists, we first developed a brief HCUE training program to assess 6 important cardiac abnormalities. We then studied the diagnostic accuracy of HCUE by hospitalists as a test of these 6 cardiac abnormalities assessed by SE.

Patients and Methods

Setting and Subjects

This prospective cohort study was performed at Stroger Hospital of Cook County, a 500‐bed public teaching hospital in Chicago, IL, from March through May of 2007. The cohort was adult inpatients who were referred for SE on weekdays from 3 distinct patient care units (Figure 1). We used 2 sampling modes to balance practical constraints (short‐stay unit [SSU] patients were more localized and, therefore, easier to study) with clinical diversity. We consecutively sampled patients from our SSU, where adults with provisional cardiovascular diagnoses are admitted if they might be eligible for discharge with in 3 days.12 But we used random number tables with a daily unique starting point to randomly sample patients from the general medical wards and the coronary care unit (CCU). Patients were excluded if repositioning them for HCUE was potentially harmful. The study was approved by our hospital's institutional review board, and we obtained written informed consent from all enrolled patients.

Figure 1
Flow diagram of HCUE results. (a) Among those excluded, 23 patients were unable to consent due to language (n = 13), current imprisonment (n = 6), or altered mental status (n = 4). The remaining 21 patients were excluded because of a requirement for immobilization (n = 8), an intraaortic balloon pump (n = 4), an external pacemaker (n = 3), endotracheal intubation (n = 3), severe pain (n = 2), or ongoing thrombolytic therapy (n = 1). (b) Twenty‐two patients were neither excluded nor refused but nevertheless had no HCUE. Among these patients, 15 were not available for hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiograms because they were discharged home from the hospital (n = 10) or undergoing other procedures (n = 5); 7 patients were never approached by study investigators. (c) Among the 322 patients who received HCUE, 8 did not receive SE. In addition, SE was not interpretable due to poor image quality for LA enlargement in 1 patient and for IVC dilatation in 30 patients. Abbreviations: CCU, cardiac care unit; echo, standard transthoracic echocardiography; HCUE, hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography; IVC, inferior vena cava; LA, left atrium; LV, left ventricle.

SE Protocol

As part of enrolled patients' routine clinical care, SE images were acquired and interpreted in the usual fashion in our hospital's echocardiography laboratory, which performs SE on over 7,000 patients per year. Echocardiographic technicians acquired images with a General Electric Vivid 7 cardiac ultrasound machine (General Electric, Milwaukee, WI) equipped with a GE M4S 1.8 to 3.4 MHz cardiac transducer (General Electric). Technicians followed the standard adult transthoracic echocardiography scanning protocol to acquire 40 to 100 images on every patient using all available echocardiographic modalities: 2‐dimensional, M‐mode, color Doppler, continuous‐wave Doppler, pulse‐wave Doppler, and tissue Doppler.13 Blinded to HCUE results, attending physician cardiologist echocardiographers then interpreted archived images using computer software (Centricity System; General Electric) to generate final reports that were entered into patients' medical records. This software ensured that final reports were standardized, because echocardiographers' final qualitative assessments were limited to short lists of standard options; for example, in reporting left atrium (LA) size, echocardiographers chose from only 5 standard options: normal, mildly dilated, moderately dilated, severely dilated, and not interpretable. Investigators, who were also blinded to HCUE results, later abstracted SE results from these standardized report forms in patients' medical records. All echocardiographers fulfilled ASE training guidelines to independently interpret SE: a minimum of 150 personally‐performed and 300 personally‐interpreted echocardiographic examinations (training level 2).14

HCUE Training

Based on the recommendations of our cardiologist investigator (B.M.), we developed a training program for 1 hospitalist to become an HCUE instructor. Our instructor trainee (C.C.) was board‐eligible in internal medicine but had no previous formal training in cardiology or echocardiography. We a priori established that her training would continue until our cardiologist investigator determined that she was ready to train other hospitalists; this determination occurred after 5 weeks. She learned image acquisition by performing focused SE on 30 patients under the direct supervision of an echocardiographic technician. She also performed focused HCUE on 65 inpatients without direct supervision but with ongoing access to consult the technician to review archived images and troubleshoot difficulties with acquisition. She learned image interpretation by reading relevant chapters from a SE textbook15 and by participating in daily didactic sessions in which attending cardiologist echocardiographers train cardiology fellows in SE interpretation.

This hospitalist then served as the HCUE instructor for 8 other attending physician hospitalists who were board‐certified internists with no previous formal training in cardiology or echocardiography. The training program was limited to acquisition and interpretation of 2‐dimensional grayscale and color Doppler images for the 6 cardiac assessments under study (Table 1). The instructor marshaled pairs of hospitalists through the 3 components of the training program, which lasted a total of 27 hours.

Twenty‐Seven‐Hour Training Program in Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography
  • Abbreviations: HCUE, hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography.

  • Slides from this lecture and additional images of normal and abnormal findings were provided on a digital video disc.

Six cardiac assessments learned using 2‐dimensional gray scale and color Doppler imaging
Left ventricular systolic dysfunction
Mitral valve regurgitation
Left atrium enlargement
Left ventricular hypertrophy
Pericardial effusion
Inferior vena cava diameter
Lecture (2 hours)*
Basic principles of echocardiography
HCUE scanning protocol and helpful techniques to optimize image quality
Hands‐on training with instructor
Orientation to machine and demonstration of scanning protocol (1 hour)
Sessions 1 through 3: HCUE performed on 1 patient per hour (6 patients in 6 hours)
Sessions 4 through 10: HCUE performed on 2 patients per hour (28 patients in 14 hours)
Feedback sessions on image quality and interpretation with cardiologist
After hands‐on training session 3 (2 hours)
After hands‐on training session 10 (2 hours)

First, hospitalists attended a 2‐hour lecture on the basic principles of HCUE. Slides from this lecture and additional images of normal and abnormal findings were provided to each hospitalist on a digital video disc. Second, each hospitalist underwent 20 hours of hands‐on training in 2‐hour sessions scheduled over 2 weeks. Willing inpatients from our hospital's emergency department were used as volunteers for these hand‐on training sessions. During these sessions the instructor provided practical suggestions to optimize image quality, such as transducer location and patient positioning. In the first 3 sessions, the minimum pace was 1 patient per hour; thereafter, the pace was increased to 1 patient per half‐hour. We chose 20 hours of hands‐on training and these minimum paces because they allowed each hospitalist to attain a cumulative experience of no less than 30 patientsan amount that heralds a flattening of the HCUE learning curve among medical trainees.9 Third, each pair of hospitalists received feedback from a cardiologist investigator (B.M.) who critiqued the quality and interpretation of images acquired by hospitalists during hands‐on training sessions. Since image quality varies by patient,16 hospitalists' images were compared side‐by‐side to images recorded by the instructor on the same patients. The cardiologist also critiqued hospitalists' interpretations of both their own images and additional sets of archived images from patients with abnormal findings.

HCUE Protocol

After completing the training program and blinded to the results of SE, the 8 hospitalists performed HCUE on enrolled patients within hours of SE. We limited the time interval between tests to minimize the effect that changes in physiologic variables, such as blood pressure and intravascular volume, have on the reliability of serial echocardiographic measurements.16 Hospitalists performed HCUE with a MicroMaxx 3.4 hand‐carried ultrasound machine equipped with a cardiology software package and a 1 to 5 MHz P17 cardiac transducer (Sonosite, Inc., Bothell, WA); simultaneous electrocardiographic recording, though available, was not used. While patients laid on their own standard hospital beds or on a standard hospital gurney in a room adjacent to the SE waiting room, hospitalists positioned them without assistance from nursing staff and recorded 7 best‐quality images per patient. Patients were first positioned in a partial (3045 degrees) left lateral decubitus position to record 4 grayscale images of the short‐axis and long‐axis parasternal and 2‐chamber and 4‐chamber apical views; 2 color Doppler images of the mitral inflow were also recorded from the long‐axis parasternal and the 4‐chamber apical views. Patients were then positioned supine to record 1 grayscale image of the inferior vena cava (IVC) from the transhepatic view. Hospitalists did not perform a history or physical exam on enrolled patients, nor did they review patients' medical records.

Immediately following the HCUE, hospitalists replayed the recorded images as often as needed and entered final interpretations on data collection forms. Linear measurements were made manually with a caliper held directly to the hand‐carried ultrasound monitor. These measurements were then translated into qualitative assessments based on standard values used by our hospital's echocardiographers (Table 2).17 When a hospitalist could not confidently assess a cardiac abnormality, the final HCUE assessment was recorded as indeterminate. Hospitalists also recorded the time to perform each HCUE, which included the time to record 7 best‐quality images, to interpret the findings, and to fill out the data collection form.

Definitions of Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography Results
  Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography Results
Cardiac Abnormality by Standard EchocardiographyHand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography Operator's Method of AssessmentPositiveNegative
  • Abbreviation: cm, centimeters.

Left ventricle systolic dysfunction, mild or greaterGrade degree of abnormal wall movement and thickening during systoleSevereMild or moderateNormalVigorous
Mitral valve regurgitation, severeClassify regurgitant jet as central or eccentric, then measure as percentage of left atrium area  
 Central jet20%<20%
 Eccentric jet20%indeterminate 20%
Left atrium enlargement, moderate or severeMeasure left atrium in 3 dimensions at end diastole, then use the most abnormal dimensionExtremeBorderline 
 Anteroposterior or mediolateral (cm)5.14.55.04.4
 Superior‐inferior (cm)7.16.17.06.0
Left ventricle hypertrophy, moderate or severeMeasure thickest dimension of posterior or septal wall at end diastoleExtreme: 1.4 cmBorderline: 1.21.3 cm1.1 cm
Pericardial effusion, medium or largeMeasure largest dimension in any view at end diastole1 cm<1 cm
Inferior vena cava dilatationMeasure largest respirophasic diameter within 2 cm of right atrium2.1 cmNormal: 1 to 2 cmContracted: 0.9 cm

Data Analysis

We based our sample size calculations on earlier reports of HCUE by noncardiologist trainees for assessment of left ventricular (LV) systolic function.7, 10 From these reports, we estimated a negative likelihood ratio of 0.3. In addition, we expected about a quarter of our patients to have LV systolic dysfunction (B.M., personal communication). Therefore, to achieve 95% confidence intervals (CIs) around the point estimate of a negative likelihood ratio that excluded 0.50, our upper bound for a clinically meaningful result, we needed a sample size of approximately 300 patients.18

We defined threshold levels of ordinal severity for the 6 cardiac abnormalities under study based on their clinical pertinence to hospitalists (Table 2). Here, we reasoned that abnormalities at or above these levels would likely lead to important changes in hospitalists' management of inpatients; abnormalities below these levels rarely represent cardiac disease that is worthy of an immediate change in management. Since even mild degrees of LV dysfunction have important diagnostic and therapeutic implications for most general medicine inpatients, particularly those presenting with heart failure,19 we set our threshold for LV dysfunction at mild or greater. In contrast, since neither mild nor moderate mitral regurgitation (MR) has immediate implications for medical or surgical therapy even if symptoms or LV dysfunction are present,20 we set our threshold for MR at severe. Similarly, though mild LA enlargement21 and mild LV hypertrophy22 have clear prognostic implications for patients' chronic medical conditions, we reasoned that only moderate or severe versions likely reflect underlying abnormalities that affect hospitalists' point‐of‐care decision‐making. Since cardiac tamponade is rarely both subclinical23 and due to a small pericardial effusion,24 we set our threshold for pericardial effusion size at moderate or large. Finally, we set our threshold IVC diameter, a marker of central venous volume status,25 at dilated, because volume overload is an important consideration in hospitalized cardiac patients.

Using these thresholds, investigators dichotomized echocardiographers' SE readings as normal or abnormal for each of the 6 cardiac abnormalities under study to serve as the reference standards. Hospitalists' HCUE results were then compared to the reference standards in 2 different ways. We first analyzed HCUE results as dichotomous values to calculate conventional sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative likelihood ratios. Here we considered indeterminate HCUE results positive in a clinically conservative tradeoff that neither ignores indeterminate results nor risks falsely classifying them as negative.26 We then analyzed hospitalists' HCUE results as ordinal values for receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. Here we considered an indeterminate result as 1 possible test result.27

To examine interobserver variability of HCUE, we first chose from the 6 possible assessments only those with a mean number of abnormal patients per hospitalist greater than 5. We reasoned that variability among assessments with lower prevalence would be predictably wide and inconclusive. We then expressed variability as standard deviations (SDs) around mean sensitivity and specificity for the 8 hospitalists.

The CIs for likelihood ratios were constructed using the likelihood‐based approach to binomial proportions of Koopman.28 The areas under ROC curves were computed using the trapezoidal rule, and the CIs for these areas were constructed using the algorithm described by DeLong et al.29 All analyses were conducted with Stata Statistical Software, Release 10 (StataCorp, College Station, TX).

Results

During the 3 month study period, 654 patients were referred for SE from the 3 participating patient care units (Figure 1). Among these, 65 patients were ineligible because their SE was performed on the weekend and 178 other patients were not randomized from the general medical wards and CCU. From the remaining eligible patients, 322 underwent HCUE and 314 (98% of 322) underwent both SE and HCUE. Individual SE assessments were not interpretable (and therefore excluded) due to poor image quality for LA enlargement in 1 patient and IVC dilatation in 30 patients. Eighty‐three percent of patients who underwent SE (260/314) were referred to assess LV function (Table 3). The prevalence of the 6 clinically pertinent cardiac abnormalities under study ranged from 1% for moderate or large pericardial effusion to 25% for LV systolic dysfunction. Overall, 40% of patients had at least 1 out of 6 cardiac abnormalities.

Patients Who Underwent Both Standard Echocardiography and Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography
Characteristic 
  • NOTE: Values are n (%) unless otherwise indicated. Total number of patients is 322.

  • Abbreviations: HCUE, hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography; SD, standard deviation.

  • Ordering physicians listed 2 indications for 103 patients, 3 indications for 10 patients, and 4 indications for 2 patients; therefore, the total number of indications (n = 443) is greater than the total number of patients (n = 314).

  • Other indications include mural thrombus (n = 13), left ventricular hypertrophy (n = 10), pericardial disease (n = 6), intracardiac shunt (n = 4), cardiomegaly (n = 4), and follow‐up of known atrial septal aneurysm (n = 1).

  • Standard echocardiography demonstrated 2 abnormal findings in 23 patients, 3 abnormal findings in 13 patients, and 4 abnormal findings in 5 patients; therefore, the total number of abnormal findings (n = 191) is greater than the total number of patients who had at least 1 abnormal finding (n = 127).

  • Includes time to record 7 best‐quality images and fill out data collection forms.

Age, year SD (25th to 75th percentiles)56 13 (48 to 64)
Women146 (47)
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease47 (15)
Body mass index 
24.9 or less: underweight or normal74 (24)
25 to 29.9: overweight94 (30)
30 to 34.9: mild obesity75 (24)
35 or greater: moderate or severe obesity71 (23)
Patient care unit 
Short‐stay unit175 (56)
General medical wards89 (28)
Cardiac care unit50 (16)
Indication for standard echocardiography* 
Left ventricular function260 (83)
Valvular function56 (18)
Wall motion abnormality29 (9)
Valvular vegetations22 (7)
Any structural heart disease20 (6)
Right ventricular function18 (6)
Other38 (12)
Standard echocardiography findings 
Left ventricular systolic dysfunction mild80 (25)
Inferior vena cava dilated45 (14)
Left ventricular wall thickness moderate33 (11)
Left atrium enlargement moderate19 (6)
Mitral valve regurgitation severe11 (4)
Pericardial effusion moderate3 (1)
At least 1 of the above findings127 (40)
Time difference between HCUE and standard echocardiogram, median hours (25th to 75th percentiles)2.8 (1.4 to 5.1)
Time to complete HCUE, median minutes (25th to 75th percentiles)28 (20 to 35)

Each hospitalist performed a similar total number of HCUE examinations (range, 3447). The median time difference between performance of SE and HCUE was 2.8 hours (25th75th percentiles, 1.45.1). Despite the high prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and obesity, hospitalists considered HCUE assessments indeterminate in only 2% to 6% of the 6 assessments made for each patient (Table 4). Among the 38 patients (12% of 322) with any indeterminate HCUE assessment, 24 patients had only 1 out of 6 possible. Hospitalists completed HCUE in a median time of 28 minutes (25th‐75th percentiles, 2035), which included the time to record 7 best‐quality moving images and to fill out the research data collection form.

Indeterminate Findings from Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography
 n (%)*
  • n = 322.

Number of indeterminate findings per patient 
0284 (88)
124 (7)
24 (1)
3 or more10 (3)
Indeterminate findings by cardiac assessment 
Mitral valve regurgitation18 (6)
Inferior vena cava diameter16 (5)
Left ventricular hypertrophy15 (5)
Pericardial effusion9 (3)
Left atrium size5 (2)
Left ventricle systolic function5 (2)

When HCUE results were analyzed as dichotomous values, positive likelihood ratios ranged from 2.5 to 21, and negative likelihood ratios ranged from 0 to 0.4 (Table 5). Positive and negative likelihood ratios were both sufficiency high and low to respectively increase and decrease by 5‐fold the prior odds of 3 out of 6 cardiac abnormalities: LV systolic dysfunction, moderate or severe MR regurgitation, and moderate or large pericardial effusion. Considering HCUE results as ordinal values for ROC analysis yielded additional diagnostic information (Figure 2). For example, the likelihood ratio of 1.0 (95% CI, 0.42.0) for borderline positive moderate or severe LA enlargement increased to 29 (range, 1362) for extreme positive results. Areas under the ROC curves were 0.9 for 4 out of 6 cardiac abnormalities.

Figure 2
ROC curves of hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography (HCUE) results. Includes all 314 patients who underwent both SE and HCUE, although SE was not interpretable (and therefore excluded) due to poor image quality for LA enlargement in 1 patient and for IVC dilatation in 30 patients. Conventional likelihood ratios are presented with 95% CI for each test result. Each likelihood ratio is calculated by dividing the probability of the test result in patients with the abnormality by the probability of the test result in patients without the abnormality. In addition, the likelihood ratios are equivalent to the slopes of the corresponding segments of the curves. An “indeterminate” HCUE result was considered 1 of the possible test results (*); likelihood ratios for these indeterminate HCUE results, which occurred in 2% to 6% of assessments, were not presented because the CIs widely spanned above and below 1. Abbreviations: AUC, area under receiver‐operating characteristic curve; LR, conventional likelihood ratio.
Diagnostic Test Characteristics of Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography for Detecting Cardiac Abnormalities
Clinically Pertinent Cardiac Abnormality by Standard EchocardiographyPrevalence n/total nSensitivity* % (95% CI)Specificity* % (95% CI)LRpositive*, (95% CI)LRnegative*, (95% CI)
  • NOTE: Includes all 314 patients who underwent both standard echocardiography and hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography, although standard echocardiography was not interpretable (and therefore excluded) due to poor image quality for LA enlargement in 1 patient and for IVC dilatation in 30 patients.

  • Indeterminate results from hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography (which occurred in 2% to 6% of assessments) were considered positive test results in calculating the test characteristics.

  • LRx is the conventional likelihood ratio of test result x, which is equal to the probability of test result x in patients with the abnormality divided by probability of test result x in patients without the abnormality; x is positive or negative.

Left ventricular systolic dysfunction80/31485 (7592)88 (8392)6.9 (4.99.8)0.2 (0.10.3)
Mitral valve regurgitation, severe11/314100 (72100)83 (7987)5.9 (3.97.4)0 (00.3)
Left atrium enlargement, moderate or severe19/31390 (6799)74 (6879)3.4 (2.54.3)0.1 (0.040.4)
Left ventricular hypertrophy, moderate or severe33/31470 (5184)73 (6778)2.5 (1.83.3)0.4 (0.20.7)
Pericardial effusion, moderate or large3/314100 (29100)95 (9297)21 (6.731)0 (00.6)
Inferior vena cava, dilated45/28456 (4070)86 (8190)4.0 (2.66.0)0.5 (0.40.7)

LV systolic dysfunction and IVC dilatation were both prevalent enough to meet our criterion to examine interobserver variability; the mean number of abnormal patients per hospitalist was 10 patients for LV systolic dysfunction and 6 patients for IVC dilatation. For LV systolic dysfunction, SDs around mean sensitivity (84%) and specificity (87%) were 12% and 6%, respectively. For IVC dilatation, SDs around mean sensitivity (58%) and specificity (86%) were 24% and 7%, respectively.

Discussion

We found that, after a 27‐hour training program, hospitalists performed HCUE with moderate to excellent diagnostic accuracy for 6 important cardiac abnormalities. For example, hospitalists' assessments of LV systolic function yielded positive and negative likelihood ratios of 6.9 (95% CI, 4.99.8) and 0.2 (95% CI, 0.10.3), respectively. At the bedsides of patients with acute heart failure, therefore, hospitalists could use HCUE to lower or raise the 50:50 chance of LV systolic dysfunction30 to 15% or 85%, respectively. Whether or not these posttest likelihoods are extreme enough to cross important thresholds will depend on the clinical context. Yet these findings demonstrate how HCUE has the potential to provide hospitalists with valuable point‐of‐care data that are otherwise unavailableeither because routine clinical assessments are unreliable31 or because echocardiographic services are not immediately accessible.1

In fact, recent data from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations shows how inaccessible SE may be. Approximately one‐quarter of hospitals in the United States send home about 10% of patients with acute heart failure without echocardiographic assessment of LV systolic function before, during, or immediately after hospitalization.32 In doing so, these hospitals leave unmet the 2002 National Quality Improvement Goal of universal assessment of LV systolic function for all heart failure patients. Hospitalists could close this quality gap with routine, 10‐minute HCUE assessments in all patients admitted with acute heart failure. (Our research HCUE protocol required a median time of 28 minutes, but this included time to assess 5 other cardiac abnormalities and collect data for research purposes). Until the clinical consequences of introducing hospitalist‐performed HCUE are studied, potential benefits like this are tentative. But our findings suggest that training hospitalists to accurately perform HCUE can be successfully accomplished in just 27 hours.

Other studies of HCUE training programs for noncardiologists have also challenged the opinion that learning to perform HCUE requires more than 100 hours of training.2, 711 Yet only 1 prior study has examined an HCUE training program for hospitalists.5 In this study by Martin et al.,5 hospitalists completed 5 supervised HCUE examinations and 6 hours of interpretation training before investigators scored their image acquisition and interpretation skills from 30 unsupervised HCUE examinations. To estimate their final skill levels at the completion of all 35 examinations by accounting for an initially steep learning curve, investigators then adjusted these scores with regression models. Despite these upward adjustments, hospitalists' image acquisition and interpretation scores were low in comparison to echocardiographic technicians and cardiology fellows. Besides these adjusted measurements of hospitalists' skills, however, Martin et al.5 unfortunately did not also report standard measures of diagnostic accuracy, like those proposed by the Standards for Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy (STARD) initiative.33 Therefore, direct comparisons to the present study are difficult. Nevertheless, their findings suggest that a training program limited to 5 supervised HCUE examinations may be inadequate for hospitalists. In fact, the same group's earlier study of medical trainees suggested a minimum of 30 supervised HCUE examinations.9 We chose to design our hospitalist training program based on this minimum, though they surprisingly did not.5 As others continue to refine the components of hospitalist HCUE training programs, such as the optimal number of supervised examinations, our program could serve as a reasonable comparative example: more rigorous than the program designed by Martin et al.5 but more feasible than ASE level 1 training.

The number and complexity of assessments taught in HCUE training programs will determine their duration. With ongoing advancements in HCUE technology, there is a growing list of potential assessments to choose from. Although HCUE training programs ought to include assessments with proven clinical applications, there are no trials of HCUE‐directed care to inform such decisions. In their absence, therefore, we chose 6 assessments based on the following 3 criteria. First, our assessments were otherwise not reliably available from routine clinical data, such as the physical examination. Second, our assessments were straightforward: easy to learn and simple to perform. Here, we based our reasoning on an expectation that the value of HCUE lies not in highly complex, state‐of‐the‐art assessmentswhich are best left to echocardiographers equipped with SEbut in simple, routine assessments made with highly portable machines that grant noncardiologists newfound access to point‐of‐care data.34 Third, our assessments were clinically pertinent and, where appropriate, defined by cut‐points at levels of severity that often lead to changes in management. We suspect that setting high cut‐points has the salutary effects of making assessments easier to learn and more accurate, because distinguishing mild abnormalities is likely the most challenging aspect of echocardiographic interpretation.35 Whether or not our choices of assessments, and their cut‐points, are optimal has yet to be determined by future research designed to study how they affect patient outcomes. Given our hospitalists' performance in the present study, these assessments seem worthy of such future research.

Our study had several limitations. We studied physicians and patients from only 1 hospital; similar studies performed in different settings, particularly among patients with different proportions and manifestations of disease, may find different results. Nevertheless, our sampling method of prospectively enrolling consecutive patients strengthens our findings. Some echocardiographic measurement methods used by our hospitalists differed in subtle ways from echocardiography guideline recommendations.35 We chose our methods (Table 2) for 2 reasons. First, whenever possible, we chose methods of interpretation that coincided with our local cardiologists'. Second, we chose simplicity over precision. For example, the biplane method of disks, or modified Simpson's rule, is the preferred volumetric method of calculating LA size.35 This method requires tracing the contours of the LA in 2 planes and then dividing the LA volume into stacked oval disks for calculation. We chose instead to train our hospitalists in a simpler method based on 2 linear measurements. Any loss of precision, however, was balanced by a large gain in simplicity. Regardless, minor variations in LA size are not likely to affect hospitalists' bedside evaluations. Finally, we did not validate the results of our reference standard (SE) by documenting interobserver reliability. Yet, because SE is generally accurate for the 6 cardiac abnormalities under study, the effect of this bias should be small.

These limitations can be addressed best by controlled trials of HCUE‐directed care. These trials will determine the clinical impact of hospitalist‐performed HCUE and, in turn, inform our design of HCUE training programs. As the current study shows, training hospitalists to participate in such trials is feasible: like other groups of noncardiologists, hospitalists can accurately perform HCUE after a brief training program. Whether or not hospitalists should perform HCUE requires further study.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Sonosite, Inc., Bothell, WA, for loaning us 2 MicroMaxx machines throughout the study period. They also thank the staff of the Internal Medicine Research Mentoring Program at Rush Medical College for their technical support and the staff of the Division of Neurology at Stroger Hospital for granting them access to a procedure room.

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Journal of Hospital Medicine - 4(6)
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340-349
Legacy Keywords
echocardiography, hospitalists, point‐of‐care systems, sensitivity and specificity
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Hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography (HCUE) can help noncardiologists answer well‐defined questions at patients' bedsides in less than 10 minutes.1, 2 Indeed, intensivists3 and emergency department physicians4 already use HCUE to make rapid, point‐of‐care assessments. Since cardiovascular diagnoses are common among general medicine inpatients, HCUE may become an important skill for hospitalists to learn.5

However, uncertainty exists about the duration of HCUE training for hospitalists. In 2002, experts from the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) published recommendations on training requirements for HCUE.6 With limited data on the safety or performance of HCUE training programs, which had just begun to emerge, the ASE borrowed from the proven training recommendations for standard echocardiography (SE). They recommended that all HCUE trainees, cardiologist and noncardiologist alike, complete level 1 SE training: 75 personally‐performed and 150 personally‐interpreted echocardiographic examinations. Since then, however, several HCUE training programs designed for noncardiologists have emerged.2, 5, 710 These alternative programs suggest that the ASE's recommended duration of training may be too long, particularly for focused HCUE that is limited to a few relatively simple assessments. It is important not to overshoot the requirements of HCUE training, because doing so may discourage groups of noncardiologists, like hospitalists, who may derive great benefits from HCUE.11

To address this uncertainty for hospitalists, we first developed a brief HCUE training program to assess 6 important cardiac abnormalities. We then studied the diagnostic accuracy of HCUE by hospitalists as a test of these 6 cardiac abnormalities assessed by SE.

Patients and Methods

Setting and Subjects

This prospective cohort study was performed at Stroger Hospital of Cook County, a 500‐bed public teaching hospital in Chicago, IL, from March through May of 2007. The cohort was adult inpatients who were referred for SE on weekdays from 3 distinct patient care units (Figure 1). We used 2 sampling modes to balance practical constraints (short‐stay unit [SSU] patients were more localized and, therefore, easier to study) with clinical diversity. We consecutively sampled patients from our SSU, where adults with provisional cardiovascular diagnoses are admitted if they might be eligible for discharge with in 3 days.12 But we used random number tables with a daily unique starting point to randomly sample patients from the general medical wards and the coronary care unit (CCU). Patients were excluded if repositioning them for HCUE was potentially harmful. The study was approved by our hospital's institutional review board, and we obtained written informed consent from all enrolled patients.

Figure 1
Flow diagram of HCUE results. (a) Among those excluded, 23 patients were unable to consent due to language (n = 13), current imprisonment (n = 6), or altered mental status (n = 4). The remaining 21 patients were excluded because of a requirement for immobilization (n = 8), an intraaortic balloon pump (n = 4), an external pacemaker (n = 3), endotracheal intubation (n = 3), severe pain (n = 2), or ongoing thrombolytic therapy (n = 1). (b) Twenty‐two patients were neither excluded nor refused but nevertheless had no HCUE. Among these patients, 15 were not available for hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiograms because they were discharged home from the hospital (n = 10) or undergoing other procedures (n = 5); 7 patients were never approached by study investigators. (c) Among the 322 patients who received HCUE, 8 did not receive SE. In addition, SE was not interpretable due to poor image quality for LA enlargement in 1 patient and for IVC dilatation in 30 patients. Abbreviations: CCU, cardiac care unit; echo, standard transthoracic echocardiography; HCUE, hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography; IVC, inferior vena cava; LA, left atrium; LV, left ventricle.

SE Protocol

As part of enrolled patients' routine clinical care, SE images were acquired and interpreted in the usual fashion in our hospital's echocardiography laboratory, which performs SE on over 7,000 patients per year. Echocardiographic technicians acquired images with a General Electric Vivid 7 cardiac ultrasound machine (General Electric, Milwaukee, WI) equipped with a GE M4S 1.8 to 3.4 MHz cardiac transducer (General Electric). Technicians followed the standard adult transthoracic echocardiography scanning protocol to acquire 40 to 100 images on every patient using all available echocardiographic modalities: 2‐dimensional, M‐mode, color Doppler, continuous‐wave Doppler, pulse‐wave Doppler, and tissue Doppler.13 Blinded to HCUE results, attending physician cardiologist echocardiographers then interpreted archived images using computer software (Centricity System; General Electric) to generate final reports that were entered into patients' medical records. This software ensured that final reports were standardized, because echocardiographers' final qualitative assessments were limited to short lists of standard options; for example, in reporting left atrium (LA) size, echocardiographers chose from only 5 standard options: normal, mildly dilated, moderately dilated, severely dilated, and not interpretable. Investigators, who were also blinded to HCUE results, later abstracted SE results from these standardized report forms in patients' medical records. All echocardiographers fulfilled ASE training guidelines to independently interpret SE: a minimum of 150 personally‐performed and 300 personally‐interpreted echocardiographic examinations (training level 2).14

HCUE Training

Based on the recommendations of our cardiologist investigator (B.M.), we developed a training program for 1 hospitalist to become an HCUE instructor. Our instructor trainee (C.C.) was board‐eligible in internal medicine but had no previous formal training in cardiology or echocardiography. We a priori established that her training would continue until our cardiologist investigator determined that she was ready to train other hospitalists; this determination occurred after 5 weeks. She learned image acquisition by performing focused SE on 30 patients under the direct supervision of an echocardiographic technician. She also performed focused HCUE on 65 inpatients without direct supervision but with ongoing access to consult the technician to review archived images and troubleshoot difficulties with acquisition. She learned image interpretation by reading relevant chapters from a SE textbook15 and by participating in daily didactic sessions in which attending cardiologist echocardiographers train cardiology fellows in SE interpretation.

This hospitalist then served as the HCUE instructor for 8 other attending physician hospitalists who were board‐certified internists with no previous formal training in cardiology or echocardiography. The training program was limited to acquisition and interpretation of 2‐dimensional grayscale and color Doppler images for the 6 cardiac assessments under study (Table 1). The instructor marshaled pairs of hospitalists through the 3 components of the training program, which lasted a total of 27 hours.

Twenty‐Seven‐Hour Training Program in Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography
  • Abbreviations: HCUE, hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography.

  • Slides from this lecture and additional images of normal and abnormal findings were provided on a digital video disc.

Six cardiac assessments learned using 2‐dimensional gray scale and color Doppler imaging
Left ventricular systolic dysfunction
Mitral valve regurgitation
Left atrium enlargement
Left ventricular hypertrophy
Pericardial effusion
Inferior vena cava diameter
Lecture (2 hours)*
Basic principles of echocardiography
HCUE scanning protocol and helpful techniques to optimize image quality
Hands‐on training with instructor
Orientation to machine and demonstration of scanning protocol (1 hour)
Sessions 1 through 3: HCUE performed on 1 patient per hour (6 patients in 6 hours)
Sessions 4 through 10: HCUE performed on 2 patients per hour (28 patients in 14 hours)
Feedback sessions on image quality and interpretation with cardiologist
After hands‐on training session 3 (2 hours)
After hands‐on training session 10 (2 hours)

First, hospitalists attended a 2‐hour lecture on the basic principles of HCUE. Slides from this lecture and additional images of normal and abnormal findings were provided to each hospitalist on a digital video disc. Second, each hospitalist underwent 20 hours of hands‐on training in 2‐hour sessions scheduled over 2 weeks. Willing inpatients from our hospital's emergency department were used as volunteers for these hand‐on training sessions. During these sessions the instructor provided practical suggestions to optimize image quality, such as transducer location and patient positioning. In the first 3 sessions, the minimum pace was 1 patient per hour; thereafter, the pace was increased to 1 patient per half‐hour. We chose 20 hours of hands‐on training and these minimum paces because they allowed each hospitalist to attain a cumulative experience of no less than 30 patientsan amount that heralds a flattening of the HCUE learning curve among medical trainees.9 Third, each pair of hospitalists received feedback from a cardiologist investigator (B.M.) who critiqued the quality and interpretation of images acquired by hospitalists during hands‐on training sessions. Since image quality varies by patient,16 hospitalists' images were compared side‐by‐side to images recorded by the instructor on the same patients. The cardiologist also critiqued hospitalists' interpretations of both their own images and additional sets of archived images from patients with abnormal findings.

HCUE Protocol

After completing the training program and blinded to the results of SE, the 8 hospitalists performed HCUE on enrolled patients within hours of SE. We limited the time interval between tests to minimize the effect that changes in physiologic variables, such as blood pressure and intravascular volume, have on the reliability of serial echocardiographic measurements.16 Hospitalists performed HCUE with a MicroMaxx 3.4 hand‐carried ultrasound machine equipped with a cardiology software package and a 1 to 5 MHz P17 cardiac transducer (Sonosite, Inc., Bothell, WA); simultaneous electrocardiographic recording, though available, was not used. While patients laid on their own standard hospital beds or on a standard hospital gurney in a room adjacent to the SE waiting room, hospitalists positioned them without assistance from nursing staff and recorded 7 best‐quality images per patient. Patients were first positioned in a partial (3045 degrees) left lateral decubitus position to record 4 grayscale images of the short‐axis and long‐axis parasternal and 2‐chamber and 4‐chamber apical views; 2 color Doppler images of the mitral inflow were also recorded from the long‐axis parasternal and the 4‐chamber apical views. Patients were then positioned supine to record 1 grayscale image of the inferior vena cava (IVC) from the transhepatic view. Hospitalists did not perform a history or physical exam on enrolled patients, nor did they review patients' medical records.

Immediately following the HCUE, hospitalists replayed the recorded images as often as needed and entered final interpretations on data collection forms. Linear measurements were made manually with a caliper held directly to the hand‐carried ultrasound monitor. These measurements were then translated into qualitative assessments based on standard values used by our hospital's echocardiographers (Table 2).17 When a hospitalist could not confidently assess a cardiac abnormality, the final HCUE assessment was recorded as indeterminate. Hospitalists also recorded the time to perform each HCUE, which included the time to record 7 best‐quality images, to interpret the findings, and to fill out the data collection form.

Definitions of Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography Results
  Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography Results
Cardiac Abnormality by Standard EchocardiographyHand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography Operator's Method of AssessmentPositiveNegative
  • Abbreviation: cm, centimeters.

Left ventricle systolic dysfunction, mild or greaterGrade degree of abnormal wall movement and thickening during systoleSevereMild or moderateNormalVigorous
Mitral valve regurgitation, severeClassify regurgitant jet as central or eccentric, then measure as percentage of left atrium area  
 Central jet20%<20%
 Eccentric jet20%indeterminate 20%
Left atrium enlargement, moderate or severeMeasure left atrium in 3 dimensions at end diastole, then use the most abnormal dimensionExtremeBorderline 
 Anteroposterior or mediolateral (cm)5.14.55.04.4
 Superior‐inferior (cm)7.16.17.06.0
Left ventricle hypertrophy, moderate or severeMeasure thickest dimension of posterior or septal wall at end diastoleExtreme: 1.4 cmBorderline: 1.21.3 cm1.1 cm
Pericardial effusion, medium or largeMeasure largest dimension in any view at end diastole1 cm<1 cm
Inferior vena cava dilatationMeasure largest respirophasic diameter within 2 cm of right atrium2.1 cmNormal: 1 to 2 cmContracted: 0.9 cm

Data Analysis

We based our sample size calculations on earlier reports of HCUE by noncardiologist trainees for assessment of left ventricular (LV) systolic function.7, 10 From these reports, we estimated a negative likelihood ratio of 0.3. In addition, we expected about a quarter of our patients to have LV systolic dysfunction (B.M., personal communication). Therefore, to achieve 95% confidence intervals (CIs) around the point estimate of a negative likelihood ratio that excluded 0.50, our upper bound for a clinically meaningful result, we needed a sample size of approximately 300 patients.18

We defined threshold levels of ordinal severity for the 6 cardiac abnormalities under study based on their clinical pertinence to hospitalists (Table 2). Here, we reasoned that abnormalities at or above these levels would likely lead to important changes in hospitalists' management of inpatients; abnormalities below these levels rarely represent cardiac disease that is worthy of an immediate change in management. Since even mild degrees of LV dysfunction have important diagnostic and therapeutic implications for most general medicine inpatients, particularly those presenting with heart failure,19 we set our threshold for LV dysfunction at mild or greater. In contrast, since neither mild nor moderate mitral regurgitation (MR) has immediate implications for medical or surgical therapy even if symptoms or LV dysfunction are present,20 we set our threshold for MR at severe. Similarly, though mild LA enlargement21 and mild LV hypertrophy22 have clear prognostic implications for patients' chronic medical conditions, we reasoned that only moderate or severe versions likely reflect underlying abnormalities that affect hospitalists' point‐of‐care decision‐making. Since cardiac tamponade is rarely both subclinical23 and due to a small pericardial effusion,24 we set our threshold for pericardial effusion size at moderate or large. Finally, we set our threshold IVC diameter, a marker of central venous volume status,25 at dilated, because volume overload is an important consideration in hospitalized cardiac patients.

Using these thresholds, investigators dichotomized echocardiographers' SE readings as normal or abnormal for each of the 6 cardiac abnormalities under study to serve as the reference standards. Hospitalists' HCUE results were then compared to the reference standards in 2 different ways. We first analyzed HCUE results as dichotomous values to calculate conventional sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative likelihood ratios. Here we considered indeterminate HCUE results positive in a clinically conservative tradeoff that neither ignores indeterminate results nor risks falsely classifying them as negative.26 We then analyzed hospitalists' HCUE results as ordinal values for receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. Here we considered an indeterminate result as 1 possible test result.27

To examine interobserver variability of HCUE, we first chose from the 6 possible assessments only those with a mean number of abnormal patients per hospitalist greater than 5. We reasoned that variability among assessments with lower prevalence would be predictably wide and inconclusive. We then expressed variability as standard deviations (SDs) around mean sensitivity and specificity for the 8 hospitalists.

The CIs for likelihood ratios were constructed using the likelihood‐based approach to binomial proportions of Koopman.28 The areas under ROC curves were computed using the trapezoidal rule, and the CIs for these areas were constructed using the algorithm described by DeLong et al.29 All analyses were conducted with Stata Statistical Software, Release 10 (StataCorp, College Station, TX).

Results

During the 3 month study period, 654 patients were referred for SE from the 3 participating patient care units (Figure 1). Among these, 65 patients were ineligible because their SE was performed on the weekend and 178 other patients were not randomized from the general medical wards and CCU. From the remaining eligible patients, 322 underwent HCUE and 314 (98% of 322) underwent both SE and HCUE. Individual SE assessments were not interpretable (and therefore excluded) due to poor image quality for LA enlargement in 1 patient and IVC dilatation in 30 patients. Eighty‐three percent of patients who underwent SE (260/314) were referred to assess LV function (Table 3). The prevalence of the 6 clinically pertinent cardiac abnormalities under study ranged from 1% for moderate or large pericardial effusion to 25% for LV systolic dysfunction. Overall, 40% of patients had at least 1 out of 6 cardiac abnormalities.

Patients Who Underwent Both Standard Echocardiography and Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography
Characteristic 
  • NOTE: Values are n (%) unless otherwise indicated. Total number of patients is 322.

  • Abbreviations: HCUE, hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography; SD, standard deviation.

  • Ordering physicians listed 2 indications for 103 patients, 3 indications for 10 patients, and 4 indications for 2 patients; therefore, the total number of indications (n = 443) is greater than the total number of patients (n = 314).

  • Other indications include mural thrombus (n = 13), left ventricular hypertrophy (n = 10), pericardial disease (n = 6), intracardiac shunt (n = 4), cardiomegaly (n = 4), and follow‐up of known atrial septal aneurysm (n = 1).

  • Standard echocardiography demonstrated 2 abnormal findings in 23 patients, 3 abnormal findings in 13 patients, and 4 abnormal findings in 5 patients; therefore, the total number of abnormal findings (n = 191) is greater than the total number of patients who had at least 1 abnormal finding (n = 127).

  • Includes time to record 7 best‐quality images and fill out data collection forms.

Age, year SD (25th to 75th percentiles)56 13 (48 to 64)
Women146 (47)
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease47 (15)
Body mass index 
24.9 or less: underweight or normal74 (24)
25 to 29.9: overweight94 (30)
30 to 34.9: mild obesity75 (24)
35 or greater: moderate or severe obesity71 (23)
Patient care unit 
Short‐stay unit175 (56)
General medical wards89 (28)
Cardiac care unit50 (16)
Indication for standard echocardiography* 
Left ventricular function260 (83)
Valvular function56 (18)
Wall motion abnormality29 (9)
Valvular vegetations22 (7)
Any structural heart disease20 (6)
Right ventricular function18 (6)
Other38 (12)
Standard echocardiography findings 
Left ventricular systolic dysfunction mild80 (25)
Inferior vena cava dilated45 (14)
Left ventricular wall thickness moderate33 (11)
Left atrium enlargement moderate19 (6)
Mitral valve regurgitation severe11 (4)
Pericardial effusion moderate3 (1)
At least 1 of the above findings127 (40)
Time difference between HCUE and standard echocardiogram, median hours (25th to 75th percentiles)2.8 (1.4 to 5.1)
Time to complete HCUE, median minutes (25th to 75th percentiles)28 (20 to 35)

Each hospitalist performed a similar total number of HCUE examinations (range, 3447). The median time difference between performance of SE and HCUE was 2.8 hours (25th75th percentiles, 1.45.1). Despite the high prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and obesity, hospitalists considered HCUE assessments indeterminate in only 2% to 6% of the 6 assessments made for each patient (Table 4). Among the 38 patients (12% of 322) with any indeterminate HCUE assessment, 24 patients had only 1 out of 6 possible. Hospitalists completed HCUE in a median time of 28 minutes (25th‐75th percentiles, 2035), which included the time to record 7 best‐quality moving images and to fill out the research data collection form.

Indeterminate Findings from Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography
 n (%)*
  • n = 322.

Number of indeterminate findings per patient 
0284 (88)
124 (7)
24 (1)
3 or more10 (3)
Indeterminate findings by cardiac assessment 
Mitral valve regurgitation18 (6)
Inferior vena cava diameter16 (5)
Left ventricular hypertrophy15 (5)
Pericardial effusion9 (3)
Left atrium size5 (2)
Left ventricle systolic function5 (2)

When HCUE results were analyzed as dichotomous values, positive likelihood ratios ranged from 2.5 to 21, and negative likelihood ratios ranged from 0 to 0.4 (Table 5). Positive and negative likelihood ratios were both sufficiency high and low to respectively increase and decrease by 5‐fold the prior odds of 3 out of 6 cardiac abnormalities: LV systolic dysfunction, moderate or severe MR regurgitation, and moderate or large pericardial effusion. Considering HCUE results as ordinal values for ROC analysis yielded additional diagnostic information (Figure 2). For example, the likelihood ratio of 1.0 (95% CI, 0.42.0) for borderline positive moderate or severe LA enlargement increased to 29 (range, 1362) for extreme positive results. Areas under the ROC curves were 0.9 for 4 out of 6 cardiac abnormalities.

Figure 2
ROC curves of hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography (HCUE) results. Includes all 314 patients who underwent both SE and HCUE, although SE was not interpretable (and therefore excluded) due to poor image quality for LA enlargement in 1 patient and for IVC dilatation in 30 patients. Conventional likelihood ratios are presented with 95% CI for each test result. Each likelihood ratio is calculated by dividing the probability of the test result in patients with the abnormality by the probability of the test result in patients without the abnormality. In addition, the likelihood ratios are equivalent to the slopes of the corresponding segments of the curves. An “indeterminate” HCUE result was considered 1 of the possible test results (*); likelihood ratios for these indeterminate HCUE results, which occurred in 2% to 6% of assessments, were not presented because the CIs widely spanned above and below 1. Abbreviations: AUC, area under receiver‐operating characteristic curve; LR, conventional likelihood ratio.
Diagnostic Test Characteristics of Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography for Detecting Cardiac Abnormalities
Clinically Pertinent Cardiac Abnormality by Standard EchocardiographyPrevalence n/total nSensitivity* % (95% CI)Specificity* % (95% CI)LRpositive*, (95% CI)LRnegative*, (95% CI)
  • NOTE: Includes all 314 patients who underwent both standard echocardiography and hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography, although standard echocardiography was not interpretable (and therefore excluded) due to poor image quality for LA enlargement in 1 patient and for IVC dilatation in 30 patients.

  • Indeterminate results from hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography (which occurred in 2% to 6% of assessments) were considered positive test results in calculating the test characteristics.

  • LRx is the conventional likelihood ratio of test result x, which is equal to the probability of test result x in patients with the abnormality divided by probability of test result x in patients without the abnormality; x is positive or negative.

Left ventricular systolic dysfunction80/31485 (7592)88 (8392)6.9 (4.99.8)0.2 (0.10.3)
Mitral valve regurgitation, severe11/314100 (72100)83 (7987)5.9 (3.97.4)0 (00.3)
Left atrium enlargement, moderate or severe19/31390 (6799)74 (6879)3.4 (2.54.3)0.1 (0.040.4)
Left ventricular hypertrophy, moderate or severe33/31470 (5184)73 (6778)2.5 (1.83.3)0.4 (0.20.7)
Pericardial effusion, moderate or large3/314100 (29100)95 (9297)21 (6.731)0 (00.6)
Inferior vena cava, dilated45/28456 (4070)86 (8190)4.0 (2.66.0)0.5 (0.40.7)

LV systolic dysfunction and IVC dilatation were both prevalent enough to meet our criterion to examine interobserver variability; the mean number of abnormal patients per hospitalist was 10 patients for LV systolic dysfunction and 6 patients for IVC dilatation. For LV systolic dysfunction, SDs around mean sensitivity (84%) and specificity (87%) were 12% and 6%, respectively. For IVC dilatation, SDs around mean sensitivity (58%) and specificity (86%) were 24% and 7%, respectively.

Discussion

We found that, after a 27‐hour training program, hospitalists performed HCUE with moderate to excellent diagnostic accuracy for 6 important cardiac abnormalities. For example, hospitalists' assessments of LV systolic function yielded positive and negative likelihood ratios of 6.9 (95% CI, 4.99.8) and 0.2 (95% CI, 0.10.3), respectively. At the bedsides of patients with acute heart failure, therefore, hospitalists could use HCUE to lower or raise the 50:50 chance of LV systolic dysfunction30 to 15% or 85%, respectively. Whether or not these posttest likelihoods are extreme enough to cross important thresholds will depend on the clinical context. Yet these findings demonstrate how HCUE has the potential to provide hospitalists with valuable point‐of‐care data that are otherwise unavailableeither because routine clinical assessments are unreliable31 or because echocardiographic services are not immediately accessible.1

In fact, recent data from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations shows how inaccessible SE may be. Approximately one‐quarter of hospitals in the United States send home about 10% of patients with acute heart failure without echocardiographic assessment of LV systolic function before, during, or immediately after hospitalization.32 In doing so, these hospitals leave unmet the 2002 National Quality Improvement Goal of universal assessment of LV systolic function for all heart failure patients. Hospitalists could close this quality gap with routine, 10‐minute HCUE assessments in all patients admitted with acute heart failure. (Our research HCUE protocol required a median time of 28 minutes, but this included time to assess 5 other cardiac abnormalities and collect data for research purposes). Until the clinical consequences of introducing hospitalist‐performed HCUE are studied, potential benefits like this are tentative. But our findings suggest that training hospitalists to accurately perform HCUE can be successfully accomplished in just 27 hours.

Other studies of HCUE training programs for noncardiologists have also challenged the opinion that learning to perform HCUE requires more than 100 hours of training.2, 711 Yet only 1 prior study has examined an HCUE training program for hospitalists.5 In this study by Martin et al.,5 hospitalists completed 5 supervised HCUE examinations and 6 hours of interpretation training before investigators scored their image acquisition and interpretation skills from 30 unsupervised HCUE examinations. To estimate their final skill levels at the completion of all 35 examinations by accounting for an initially steep learning curve, investigators then adjusted these scores with regression models. Despite these upward adjustments, hospitalists' image acquisition and interpretation scores were low in comparison to echocardiographic technicians and cardiology fellows. Besides these adjusted measurements of hospitalists' skills, however, Martin et al.5 unfortunately did not also report standard measures of diagnostic accuracy, like those proposed by the Standards for Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy (STARD) initiative.33 Therefore, direct comparisons to the present study are difficult. Nevertheless, their findings suggest that a training program limited to 5 supervised HCUE examinations may be inadequate for hospitalists. In fact, the same group's earlier study of medical trainees suggested a minimum of 30 supervised HCUE examinations.9 We chose to design our hospitalist training program based on this minimum, though they surprisingly did not.5 As others continue to refine the components of hospitalist HCUE training programs, such as the optimal number of supervised examinations, our program could serve as a reasonable comparative example: more rigorous than the program designed by Martin et al.5 but more feasible than ASE level 1 training.

The number and complexity of assessments taught in HCUE training programs will determine their duration. With ongoing advancements in HCUE technology, there is a growing list of potential assessments to choose from. Although HCUE training programs ought to include assessments with proven clinical applications, there are no trials of HCUE‐directed care to inform such decisions. In their absence, therefore, we chose 6 assessments based on the following 3 criteria. First, our assessments were otherwise not reliably available from routine clinical data, such as the physical examination. Second, our assessments were straightforward: easy to learn and simple to perform. Here, we based our reasoning on an expectation that the value of HCUE lies not in highly complex, state‐of‐the‐art assessmentswhich are best left to echocardiographers equipped with SEbut in simple, routine assessments made with highly portable machines that grant noncardiologists newfound access to point‐of‐care data.34 Third, our assessments were clinically pertinent and, where appropriate, defined by cut‐points at levels of severity that often lead to changes in management. We suspect that setting high cut‐points has the salutary effects of making assessments easier to learn and more accurate, because distinguishing mild abnormalities is likely the most challenging aspect of echocardiographic interpretation.35 Whether or not our choices of assessments, and their cut‐points, are optimal has yet to be determined by future research designed to study how they affect patient outcomes. Given our hospitalists' performance in the present study, these assessments seem worthy of such future research.

Our study had several limitations. We studied physicians and patients from only 1 hospital; similar studies performed in different settings, particularly among patients with different proportions and manifestations of disease, may find different results. Nevertheless, our sampling method of prospectively enrolling consecutive patients strengthens our findings. Some echocardiographic measurement methods used by our hospitalists differed in subtle ways from echocardiography guideline recommendations.35 We chose our methods (Table 2) for 2 reasons. First, whenever possible, we chose methods of interpretation that coincided with our local cardiologists'. Second, we chose simplicity over precision. For example, the biplane method of disks, or modified Simpson's rule, is the preferred volumetric method of calculating LA size.35 This method requires tracing the contours of the LA in 2 planes and then dividing the LA volume into stacked oval disks for calculation. We chose instead to train our hospitalists in a simpler method based on 2 linear measurements. Any loss of precision, however, was balanced by a large gain in simplicity. Regardless, minor variations in LA size are not likely to affect hospitalists' bedside evaluations. Finally, we did not validate the results of our reference standard (SE) by documenting interobserver reliability. Yet, because SE is generally accurate for the 6 cardiac abnormalities under study, the effect of this bias should be small.

These limitations can be addressed best by controlled trials of HCUE‐directed care. These trials will determine the clinical impact of hospitalist‐performed HCUE and, in turn, inform our design of HCUE training programs. As the current study shows, training hospitalists to participate in such trials is feasible: like other groups of noncardiologists, hospitalists can accurately perform HCUE after a brief training program. Whether or not hospitalists should perform HCUE requires further study.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Sonosite, Inc., Bothell, WA, for loaning us 2 MicroMaxx machines throughout the study period. They also thank the staff of the Internal Medicine Research Mentoring Program at Rush Medical College for their technical support and the staff of the Division of Neurology at Stroger Hospital for granting them access to a procedure room.

Hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography (HCUE) can help noncardiologists answer well‐defined questions at patients' bedsides in less than 10 minutes.1, 2 Indeed, intensivists3 and emergency department physicians4 already use HCUE to make rapid, point‐of‐care assessments. Since cardiovascular diagnoses are common among general medicine inpatients, HCUE may become an important skill for hospitalists to learn.5

However, uncertainty exists about the duration of HCUE training for hospitalists. In 2002, experts from the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) published recommendations on training requirements for HCUE.6 With limited data on the safety or performance of HCUE training programs, which had just begun to emerge, the ASE borrowed from the proven training recommendations for standard echocardiography (SE). They recommended that all HCUE trainees, cardiologist and noncardiologist alike, complete level 1 SE training: 75 personally‐performed and 150 personally‐interpreted echocardiographic examinations. Since then, however, several HCUE training programs designed for noncardiologists have emerged.2, 5, 710 These alternative programs suggest that the ASE's recommended duration of training may be too long, particularly for focused HCUE that is limited to a few relatively simple assessments. It is important not to overshoot the requirements of HCUE training, because doing so may discourage groups of noncardiologists, like hospitalists, who may derive great benefits from HCUE.11

To address this uncertainty for hospitalists, we first developed a brief HCUE training program to assess 6 important cardiac abnormalities. We then studied the diagnostic accuracy of HCUE by hospitalists as a test of these 6 cardiac abnormalities assessed by SE.

Patients and Methods

Setting and Subjects

This prospective cohort study was performed at Stroger Hospital of Cook County, a 500‐bed public teaching hospital in Chicago, IL, from March through May of 2007. The cohort was adult inpatients who were referred for SE on weekdays from 3 distinct patient care units (Figure 1). We used 2 sampling modes to balance practical constraints (short‐stay unit [SSU] patients were more localized and, therefore, easier to study) with clinical diversity. We consecutively sampled patients from our SSU, where adults with provisional cardiovascular diagnoses are admitted if they might be eligible for discharge with in 3 days.12 But we used random number tables with a daily unique starting point to randomly sample patients from the general medical wards and the coronary care unit (CCU). Patients were excluded if repositioning them for HCUE was potentially harmful. The study was approved by our hospital's institutional review board, and we obtained written informed consent from all enrolled patients.

Figure 1
Flow diagram of HCUE results. (a) Among those excluded, 23 patients were unable to consent due to language (n = 13), current imprisonment (n = 6), or altered mental status (n = 4). The remaining 21 patients were excluded because of a requirement for immobilization (n = 8), an intraaortic balloon pump (n = 4), an external pacemaker (n = 3), endotracheal intubation (n = 3), severe pain (n = 2), or ongoing thrombolytic therapy (n = 1). (b) Twenty‐two patients were neither excluded nor refused but nevertheless had no HCUE. Among these patients, 15 were not available for hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiograms because they were discharged home from the hospital (n = 10) or undergoing other procedures (n = 5); 7 patients were never approached by study investigators. (c) Among the 322 patients who received HCUE, 8 did not receive SE. In addition, SE was not interpretable due to poor image quality for LA enlargement in 1 patient and for IVC dilatation in 30 patients. Abbreviations: CCU, cardiac care unit; echo, standard transthoracic echocardiography; HCUE, hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography; IVC, inferior vena cava; LA, left atrium; LV, left ventricle.

SE Protocol

As part of enrolled patients' routine clinical care, SE images were acquired and interpreted in the usual fashion in our hospital's echocardiography laboratory, which performs SE on over 7,000 patients per year. Echocardiographic technicians acquired images with a General Electric Vivid 7 cardiac ultrasound machine (General Electric, Milwaukee, WI) equipped with a GE M4S 1.8 to 3.4 MHz cardiac transducer (General Electric). Technicians followed the standard adult transthoracic echocardiography scanning protocol to acquire 40 to 100 images on every patient using all available echocardiographic modalities: 2‐dimensional, M‐mode, color Doppler, continuous‐wave Doppler, pulse‐wave Doppler, and tissue Doppler.13 Blinded to HCUE results, attending physician cardiologist echocardiographers then interpreted archived images using computer software (Centricity System; General Electric) to generate final reports that were entered into patients' medical records. This software ensured that final reports were standardized, because echocardiographers' final qualitative assessments were limited to short lists of standard options; for example, in reporting left atrium (LA) size, echocardiographers chose from only 5 standard options: normal, mildly dilated, moderately dilated, severely dilated, and not interpretable. Investigators, who were also blinded to HCUE results, later abstracted SE results from these standardized report forms in patients' medical records. All echocardiographers fulfilled ASE training guidelines to independently interpret SE: a minimum of 150 personally‐performed and 300 personally‐interpreted echocardiographic examinations (training level 2).14

HCUE Training

Based on the recommendations of our cardiologist investigator (B.M.), we developed a training program for 1 hospitalist to become an HCUE instructor. Our instructor trainee (C.C.) was board‐eligible in internal medicine but had no previous formal training in cardiology or echocardiography. We a priori established that her training would continue until our cardiologist investigator determined that she was ready to train other hospitalists; this determination occurred after 5 weeks. She learned image acquisition by performing focused SE on 30 patients under the direct supervision of an echocardiographic technician. She also performed focused HCUE on 65 inpatients without direct supervision but with ongoing access to consult the technician to review archived images and troubleshoot difficulties with acquisition. She learned image interpretation by reading relevant chapters from a SE textbook15 and by participating in daily didactic sessions in which attending cardiologist echocardiographers train cardiology fellows in SE interpretation.

This hospitalist then served as the HCUE instructor for 8 other attending physician hospitalists who were board‐certified internists with no previous formal training in cardiology or echocardiography. The training program was limited to acquisition and interpretation of 2‐dimensional grayscale and color Doppler images for the 6 cardiac assessments under study (Table 1). The instructor marshaled pairs of hospitalists through the 3 components of the training program, which lasted a total of 27 hours.

Twenty‐Seven‐Hour Training Program in Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography
  • Abbreviations: HCUE, hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography.

  • Slides from this lecture and additional images of normal and abnormal findings were provided on a digital video disc.

Six cardiac assessments learned using 2‐dimensional gray scale and color Doppler imaging
Left ventricular systolic dysfunction
Mitral valve regurgitation
Left atrium enlargement
Left ventricular hypertrophy
Pericardial effusion
Inferior vena cava diameter
Lecture (2 hours)*
Basic principles of echocardiography
HCUE scanning protocol and helpful techniques to optimize image quality
Hands‐on training with instructor
Orientation to machine and demonstration of scanning protocol (1 hour)
Sessions 1 through 3: HCUE performed on 1 patient per hour (6 patients in 6 hours)
Sessions 4 through 10: HCUE performed on 2 patients per hour (28 patients in 14 hours)
Feedback sessions on image quality and interpretation with cardiologist
After hands‐on training session 3 (2 hours)
After hands‐on training session 10 (2 hours)

First, hospitalists attended a 2‐hour lecture on the basic principles of HCUE. Slides from this lecture and additional images of normal and abnormal findings were provided to each hospitalist on a digital video disc. Second, each hospitalist underwent 20 hours of hands‐on training in 2‐hour sessions scheduled over 2 weeks. Willing inpatients from our hospital's emergency department were used as volunteers for these hand‐on training sessions. During these sessions the instructor provided practical suggestions to optimize image quality, such as transducer location and patient positioning. In the first 3 sessions, the minimum pace was 1 patient per hour; thereafter, the pace was increased to 1 patient per half‐hour. We chose 20 hours of hands‐on training and these minimum paces because they allowed each hospitalist to attain a cumulative experience of no less than 30 patientsan amount that heralds a flattening of the HCUE learning curve among medical trainees.9 Third, each pair of hospitalists received feedback from a cardiologist investigator (B.M.) who critiqued the quality and interpretation of images acquired by hospitalists during hands‐on training sessions. Since image quality varies by patient,16 hospitalists' images were compared side‐by‐side to images recorded by the instructor on the same patients. The cardiologist also critiqued hospitalists' interpretations of both their own images and additional sets of archived images from patients with abnormal findings.

HCUE Protocol

After completing the training program and blinded to the results of SE, the 8 hospitalists performed HCUE on enrolled patients within hours of SE. We limited the time interval between tests to minimize the effect that changes in physiologic variables, such as blood pressure and intravascular volume, have on the reliability of serial echocardiographic measurements.16 Hospitalists performed HCUE with a MicroMaxx 3.4 hand‐carried ultrasound machine equipped with a cardiology software package and a 1 to 5 MHz P17 cardiac transducer (Sonosite, Inc., Bothell, WA); simultaneous electrocardiographic recording, though available, was not used. While patients laid on their own standard hospital beds or on a standard hospital gurney in a room adjacent to the SE waiting room, hospitalists positioned them without assistance from nursing staff and recorded 7 best‐quality images per patient. Patients were first positioned in a partial (3045 degrees) left lateral decubitus position to record 4 grayscale images of the short‐axis and long‐axis parasternal and 2‐chamber and 4‐chamber apical views; 2 color Doppler images of the mitral inflow were also recorded from the long‐axis parasternal and the 4‐chamber apical views. Patients were then positioned supine to record 1 grayscale image of the inferior vena cava (IVC) from the transhepatic view. Hospitalists did not perform a history or physical exam on enrolled patients, nor did they review patients' medical records.

Immediately following the HCUE, hospitalists replayed the recorded images as often as needed and entered final interpretations on data collection forms. Linear measurements were made manually with a caliper held directly to the hand‐carried ultrasound monitor. These measurements were then translated into qualitative assessments based on standard values used by our hospital's echocardiographers (Table 2).17 When a hospitalist could not confidently assess a cardiac abnormality, the final HCUE assessment was recorded as indeterminate. Hospitalists also recorded the time to perform each HCUE, which included the time to record 7 best‐quality images, to interpret the findings, and to fill out the data collection form.

Definitions of Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography Results
  Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography Results
Cardiac Abnormality by Standard EchocardiographyHand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography Operator's Method of AssessmentPositiveNegative
  • Abbreviation: cm, centimeters.

Left ventricle systolic dysfunction, mild or greaterGrade degree of abnormal wall movement and thickening during systoleSevereMild or moderateNormalVigorous
Mitral valve regurgitation, severeClassify regurgitant jet as central or eccentric, then measure as percentage of left atrium area  
 Central jet20%<20%
 Eccentric jet20%indeterminate 20%
Left atrium enlargement, moderate or severeMeasure left atrium in 3 dimensions at end diastole, then use the most abnormal dimensionExtremeBorderline 
 Anteroposterior or mediolateral (cm)5.14.55.04.4
 Superior‐inferior (cm)7.16.17.06.0
Left ventricle hypertrophy, moderate or severeMeasure thickest dimension of posterior or septal wall at end diastoleExtreme: 1.4 cmBorderline: 1.21.3 cm1.1 cm
Pericardial effusion, medium or largeMeasure largest dimension in any view at end diastole1 cm<1 cm
Inferior vena cava dilatationMeasure largest respirophasic diameter within 2 cm of right atrium2.1 cmNormal: 1 to 2 cmContracted: 0.9 cm

Data Analysis

We based our sample size calculations on earlier reports of HCUE by noncardiologist trainees for assessment of left ventricular (LV) systolic function.7, 10 From these reports, we estimated a negative likelihood ratio of 0.3. In addition, we expected about a quarter of our patients to have LV systolic dysfunction (B.M., personal communication). Therefore, to achieve 95% confidence intervals (CIs) around the point estimate of a negative likelihood ratio that excluded 0.50, our upper bound for a clinically meaningful result, we needed a sample size of approximately 300 patients.18

We defined threshold levels of ordinal severity for the 6 cardiac abnormalities under study based on their clinical pertinence to hospitalists (Table 2). Here, we reasoned that abnormalities at or above these levels would likely lead to important changes in hospitalists' management of inpatients; abnormalities below these levels rarely represent cardiac disease that is worthy of an immediate change in management. Since even mild degrees of LV dysfunction have important diagnostic and therapeutic implications for most general medicine inpatients, particularly those presenting with heart failure,19 we set our threshold for LV dysfunction at mild or greater. In contrast, since neither mild nor moderate mitral regurgitation (MR) has immediate implications for medical or surgical therapy even if symptoms or LV dysfunction are present,20 we set our threshold for MR at severe. Similarly, though mild LA enlargement21 and mild LV hypertrophy22 have clear prognostic implications for patients' chronic medical conditions, we reasoned that only moderate or severe versions likely reflect underlying abnormalities that affect hospitalists' point‐of‐care decision‐making. Since cardiac tamponade is rarely both subclinical23 and due to a small pericardial effusion,24 we set our threshold for pericardial effusion size at moderate or large. Finally, we set our threshold IVC diameter, a marker of central venous volume status,25 at dilated, because volume overload is an important consideration in hospitalized cardiac patients.

Using these thresholds, investigators dichotomized echocardiographers' SE readings as normal or abnormal for each of the 6 cardiac abnormalities under study to serve as the reference standards. Hospitalists' HCUE results were then compared to the reference standards in 2 different ways. We first analyzed HCUE results as dichotomous values to calculate conventional sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative likelihood ratios. Here we considered indeterminate HCUE results positive in a clinically conservative tradeoff that neither ignores indeterminate results nor risks falsely classifying them as negative.26 We then analyzed hospitalists' HCUE results as ordinal values for receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. Here we considered an indeterminate result as 1 possible test result.27

To examine interobserver variability of HCUE, we first chose from the 6 possible assessments only those with a mean number of abnormal patients per hospitalist greater than 5. We reasoned that variability among assessments with lower prevalence would be predictably wide and inconclusive. We then expressed variability as standard deviations (SDs) around mean sensitivity and specificity for the 8 hospitalists.

The CIs for likelihood ratios were constructed using the likelihood‐based approach to binomial proportions of Koopman.28 The areas under ROC curves were computed using the trapezoidal rule, and the CIs for these areas were constructed using the algorithm described by DeLong et al.29 All analyses were conducted with Stata Statistical Software, Release 10 (StataCorp, College Station, TX).

Results

During the 3 month study period, 654 patients were referred for SE from the 3 participating patient care units (Figure 1). Among these, 65 patients were ineligible because their SE was performed on the weekend and 178 other patients were not randomized from the general medical wards and CCU. From the remaining eligible patients, 322 underwent HCUE and 314 (98% of 322) underwent both SE and HCUE. Individual SE assessments were not interpretable (and therefore excluded) due to poor image quality for LA enlargement in 1 patient and IVC dilatation in 30 patients. Eighty‐three percent of patients who underwent SE (260/314) were referred to assess LV function (Table 3). The prevalence of the 6 clinically pertinent cardiac abnormalities under study ranged from 1% for moderate or large pericardial effusion to 25% for LV systolic dysfunction. Overall, 40% of patients had at least 1 out of 6 cardiac abnormalities.

Patients Who Underwent Both Standard Echocardiography and Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography
Characteristic 
  • NOTE: Values are n (%) unless otherwise indicated. Total number of patients is 322.

  • Abbreviations: HCUE, hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography; SD, standard deviation.

  • Ordering physicians listed 2 indications for 103 patients, 3 indications for 10 patients, and 4 indications for 2 patients; therefore, the total number of indications (n = 443) is greater than the total number of patients (n = 314).

  • Other indications include mural thrombus (n = 13), left ventricular hypertrophy (n = 10), pericardial disease (n = 6), intracardiac shunt (n = 4), cardiomegaly (n = 4), and follow‐up of known atrial septal aneurysm (n = 1).

  • Standard echocardiography demonstrated 2 abnormal findings in 23 patients, 3 abnormal findings in 13 patients, and 4 abnormal findings in 5 patients; therefore, the total number of abnormal findings (n = 191) is greater than the total number of patients who had at least 1 abnormal finding (n = 127).

  • Includes time to record 7 best‐quality images and fill out data collection forms.

Age, year SD (25th to 75th percentiles)56 13 (48 to 64)
Women146 (47)
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease47 (15)
Body mass index 
24.9 or less: underweight or normal74 (24)
25 to 29.9: overweight94 (30)
30 to 34.9: mild obesity75 (24)
35 or greater: moderate or severe obesity71 (23)
Patient care unit 
Short‐stay unit175 (56)
General medical wards89 (28)
Cardiac care unit50 (16)
Indication for standard echocardiography* 
Left ventricular function260 (83)
Valvular function56 (18)
Wall motion abnormality29 (9)
Valvular vegetations22 (7)
Any structural heart disease20 (6)
Right ventricular function18 (6)
Other38 (12)
Standard echocardiography findings 
Left ventricular systolic dysfunction mild80 (25)
Inferior vena cava dilated45 (14)
Left ventricular wall thickness moderate33 (11)
Left atrium enlargement moderate19 (6)
Mitral valve regurgitation severe11 (4)
Pericardial effusion moderate3 (1)
At least 1 of the above findings127 (40)
Time difference between HCUE and standard echocardiogram, median hours (25th to 75th percentiles)2.8 (1.4 to 5.1)
Time to complete HCUE, median minutes (25th to 75th percentiles)28 (20 to 35)

Each hospitalist performed a similar total number of HCUE examinations (range, 3447). The median time difference between performance of SE and HCUE was 2.8 hours (25th75th percentiles, 1.45.1). Despite the high prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and obesity, hospitalists considered HCUE assessments indeterminate in only 2% to 6% of the 6 assessments made for each patient (Table 4). Among the 38 patients (12% of 322) with any indeterminate HCUE assessment, 24 patients had only 1 out of 6 possible. Hospitalists completed HCUE in a median time of 28 minutes (25th‐75th percentiles, 2035), which included the time to record 7 best‐quality moving images and to fill out the research data collection form.

Indeterminate Findings from Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography
 n (%)*
  • n = 322.

Number of indeterminate findings per patient 
0284 (88)
124 (7)
24 (1)
3 or more10 (3)
Indeterminate findings by cardiac assessment 
Mitral valve regurgitation18 (6)
Inferior vena cava diameter16 (5)
Left ventricular hypertrophy15 (5)
Pericardial effusion9 (3)
Left atrium size5 (2)
Left ventricle systolic function5 (2)

When HCUE results were analyzed as dichotomous values, positive likelihood ratios ranged from 2.5 to 21, and negative likelihood ratios ranged from 0 to 0.4 (Table 5). Positive and negative likelihood ratios were both sufficiency high and low to respectively increase and decrease by 5‐fold the prior odds of 3 out of 6 cardiac abnormalities: LV systolic dysfunction, moderate or severe MR regurgitation, and moderate or large pericardial effusion. Considering HCUE results as ordinal values for ROC analysis yielded additional diagnostic information (Figure 2). For example, the likelihood ratio of 1.0 (95% CI, 0.42.0) for borderline positive moderate or severe LA enlargement increased to 29 (range, 1362) for extreme positive results. Areas under the ROC curves were 0.9 for 4 out of 6 cardiac abnormalities.

Figure 2
ROC curves of hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography (HCUE) results. Includes all 314 patients who underwent both SE and HCUE, although SE was not interpretable (and therefore excluded) due to poor image quality for LA enlargement in 1 patient and for IVC dilatation in 30 patients. Conventional likelihood ratios are presented with 95% CI for each test result. Each likelihood ratio is calculated by dividing the probability of the test result in patients with the abnormality by the probability of the test result in patients without the abnormality. In addition, the likelihood ratios are equivalent to the slopes of the corresponding segments of the curves. An “indeterminate” HCUE result was considered 1 of the possible test results (*); likelihood ratios for these indeterminate HCUE results, which occurred in 2% to 6% of assessments, were not presented because the CIs widely spanned above and below 1. Abbreviations: AUC, area under receiver‐operating characteristic curve; LR, conventional likelihood ratio.
Diagnostic Test Characteristics of Hand‐Carried Ultrasound Echocardiography for Detecting Cardiac Abnormalities
Clinically Pertinent Cardiac Abnormality by Standard EchocardiographyPrevalence n/total nSensitivity* % (95% CI)Specificity* % (95% CI)LRpositive*, (95% CI)LRnegative*, (95% CI)
  • NOTE: Includes all 314 patients who underwent both standard echocardiography and hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography, although standard echocardiography was not interpretable (and therefore excluded) due to poor image quality for LA enlargement in 1 patient and for IVC dilatation in 30 patients.

  • Indeterminate results from hand‐carried ultrasound echocardiography (which occurred in 2% to 6% of assessments) were considered positive test results in calculating the test characteristics.

  • LRx is the conventional likelihood ratio of test result x, which is equal to the probability of test result x in patients with the abnormality divided by probability of test result x in patients without the abnormality; x is positive or negative.

Left ventricular systolic dysfunction80/31485 (7592)88 (8392)6.9 (4.99.8)0.2 (0.10.3)
Mitral valve regurgitation, severe11/314100 (72100)83 (7987)5.9 (3.97.4)0 (00.3)
Left atrium enlargement, moderate or severe19/31390 (6799)74 (6879)3.4 (2.54.3)0.1 (0.040.4)
Left ventricular hypertrophy, moderate or severe33/31470 (5184)73 (6778)2.5 (1.83.3)0.4 (0.20.7)
Pericardial effusion, moderate or large3/314100 (29100)95 (9297)21 (6.731)0 (00.6)
Inferior vena cava, dilated45/28456 (4070)86 (8190)4.0 (2.66.0)0.5 (0.40.7)

LV systolic dysfunction and IVC dilatation were both prevalent enough to meet our criterion to examine interobserver variability; the mean number of abnormal patients per hospitalist was 10 patients for LV systolic dysfunction and 6 patients for IVC dilatation. For LV systolic dysfunction, SDs around mean sensitivity (84%) and specificity (87%) were 12% and 6%, respectively. For IVC dilatation, SDs around mean sensitivity (58%) and specificity (86%) were 24% and 7%, respectively.

Discussion

We found that, after a 27‐hour training program, hospitalists performed HCUE with moderate to excellent diagnostic accuracy for 6 important cardiac abnormalities. For example, hospitalists' assessments of LV systolic function yielded positive and negative likelihood ratios of 6.9 (95% CI, 4.99.8) and 0.2 (95% CI, 0.10.3), respectively. At the bedsides of patients with acute heart failure, therefore, hospitalists could use HCUE to lower or raise the 50:50 chance of LV systolic dysfunction30 to 15% or 85%, respectively. Whether or not these posttest likelihoods are extreme enough to cross important thresholds will depend on the clinical context. Yet these findings demonstrate how HCUE has the potential to provide hospitalists with valuable point‐of‐care data that are otherwise unavailableeither because routine clinical assessments are unreliable31 or because echocardiographic services are not immediately accessible.1

In fact, recent data from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations shows how inaccessible SE may be. Approximately one‐quarter of hospitals in the United States send home about 10% of patients with acute heart failure without echocardiographic assessment of LV systolic function before, during, or immediately after hospitalization.32 In doing so, these hospitals leave unmet the 2002 National Quality Improvement Goal of universal assessment of LV systolic function for all heart failure patients. Hospitalists could close this quality gap with routine, 10‐minute HCUE assessments in all patients admitted with acute heart failure. (Our research HCUE protocol required a median time of 28 minutes, but this included time to assess 5 other cardiac abnormalities and collect data for research purposes). Until the clinical consequences of introducing hospitalist‐performed HCUE are studied, potential benefits like this are tentative. But our findings suggest that training hospitalists to accurately perform HCUE can be successfully accomplished in just 27 hours.

Other studies of HCUE training programs for noncardiologists have also challenged the opinion that learning to perform HCUE requires more than 100 hours of training.2, 711 Yet only 1 prior study has examined an HCUE training program for hospitalists.5 In this study by Martin et al.,5 hospitalists completed 5 supervised HCUE examinations and 6 hours of interpretation training before investigators scored their image acquisition and interpretation skills from 30 unsupervised HCUE examinations. To estimate their final skill levels at the completion of all 35 examinations by accounting for an initially steep learning curve, investigators then adjusted these scores with regression models. Despite these upward adjustments, hospitalists' image acquisition and interpretation scores were low in comparison to echocardiographic technicians and cardiology fellows. Besides these adjusted measurements of hospitalists' skills, however, Martin et al.5 unfortunately did not also report standard measures of diagnostic accuracy, like those proposed by the Standards for Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy (STARD) initiative.33 Therefore, direct comparisons to the present study are difficult. Nevertheless, their findings suggest that a training program limited to 5 supervised HCUE examinations may be inadequate for hospitalists. In fact, the same group's earlier study of medical trainees suggested a minimum of 30 supervised HCUE examinations.9 We chose to design our hospitalist training program based on this minimum, though they surprisingly did not.5 As others continue to refine the components of hospitalist HCUE training programs, such as the optimal number of supervised examinations, our program could serve as a reasonable comparative example: more rigorous than the program designed by Martin et al.5 but more feasible than ASE level 1 training.

The number and complexity of assessments taught in HCUE training programs will determine their duration. With ongoing advancements in HCUE technology, there is a growing list of potential assessments to choose from. Although HCUE training programs ought to include assessments with proven clinical applications, there are no trials of HCUE‐directed care to inform such decisions. In their absence, therefore, we chose 6 assessments based on the following 3 criteria. First, our assessments were otherwise not reliably available from routine clinical data, such as the physical examination. Second, our assessments were straightforward: easy to learn and simple to perform. Here, we based our reasoning on an expectation that the value of HCUE lies not in highly complex, state‐of‐the‐art assessmentswhich are best left to echocardiographers equipped with SEbut in simple, routine assessments made with highly portable machines that grant noncardiologists newfound access to point‐of‐care data.34 Third, our assessments were clinically pertinent and, where appropriate, defined by cut‐points at levels of severity that often lead to changes in management. We suspect that setting high cut‐points has the salutary effects of making assessments easier to learn and more accurate, because distinguishing mild abnormalities is likely the most challenging aspect of echocardiographic interpretation.35 Whether or not our choices of assessments, and their cut‐points, are optimal has yet to be determined by future research designed to study how they affect patient outcomes. Given our hospitalists' performance in the present study, these assessments seem worthy of such future research.

Our study had several limitations. We studied physicians and patients from only 1 hospital; similar studies performed in different settings, particularly among patients with different proportions and manifestations of disease, may find different results. Nevertheless, our sampling method of prospectively enrolling consecutive patients strengthens our findings. Some echocardiographic measurement methods used by our hospitalists differed in subtle ways from echocardiography guideline recommendations.35 We chose our methods (Table 2) for 2 reasons. First, whenever possible, we chose methods of interpretation that coincided with our local cardiologists'. Second, we chose simplicity over precision. For example, the biplane method of disks, or modified Simpson's rule, is the preferred volumetric method of calculating LA size.35 This method requires tracing the contours of the LA in 2 planes and then dividing the LA volume into stacked oval disks for calculation. We chose instead to train our hospitalists in a simpler method based on 2 linear measurements. Any loss of precision, however, was balanced by a large gain in simplicity. Regardless, minor variations in LA size are not likely to affect hospitalists' bedside evaluations. Finally, we did not validate the results of our reference standard (SE) by documenting interobserver reliability. Yet, because SE is generally accurate for the 6 cardiac abnormalities under study, the effect of this bias should be small.

These limitations can be addressed best by controlled trials of HCUE‐directed care. These trials will determine the clinical impact of hospitalist‐performed HCUE and, in turn, inform our design of HCUE training programs. As the current study shows, training hospitalists to participate in such trials is feasible: like other groups of noncardiologists, hospitalists can accurately perform HCUE after a brief training program. Whether or not hospitalists should perform HCUE requires further study.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Sonosite, Inc., Bothell, WA, for loaning us 2 MicroMaxx machines throughout the study period. They also thank the staff of the Internal Medicine Research Mentoring Program at Rush Medical College for their technical support and the staff of the Division of Neurology at Stroger Hospital for granting them access to a procedure room.

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References
  1. Popp RL.The physical examination of the future: echocardiography as part of the assessment.ACC Curr J Rev.1998;7:7981.
  2. DeCara JM,Lang RM,Spencer KT.The hand‐carried echocardiographic device as an aid to the physical examination.Echocardiography.2003;20:477485.
  3. Beaulieu Y,Marik PE.Bedside ultrasonography in the ICU: Part 2.Chest.2005;128:17661781.
  4. Cosby KS,Kendall JL.Practical Guide to Emergency Ultrasound.1st ed.Philadelphia, PA:Lippincott Williams 2006.
  5. Martin LD,Howell EE,Ziegelstein RC,Martire C,Shapiro EP,Hellmann DB.Hospitalist performance of cardiac hand‐carried ultrasound after focused training.Am J Med.2007;120:10001004.
  6. Seward JB,Douglas PS,Erbel R, et al.Hand‐carried cardiac ultrasound (HCU) device: recommendations regarding new technology. A report from the echocardiography task force on new technology of the Nomenclature and Standards Committee of the American Society of Echocardiography.J Am Soc Echocardiogr.2002;15:369373.
  7. DeCara JM,Lang RM,Koch R,Bala R,Penzotti J,Spencer KT.The use of small personal ultrasound devices with internists without formal training in echocardiography.Eur J Echocardiogr.2003;4:141147.
  8. Alexander JH,Peterson ED,Chen AY, et al.Feasibility of point‐of‐care echocardiography by internal medicine house staff.Am Heart J.2004;147:476481.
  9. Hellman DB,Whiting‐O'Keefe Q,Shapiro EP,Martin LD,Martire C,Ziegelstein RC.The rate at which residents learn to use hand‐held echocardiography at the bedside.Am J Med.2005;118:10101018.
  10. Kobal SL,Trento L,Baharami S, et al.Comparison of effectiveness of hand‐carried ultrasound to bedside cardiovascular physical examination.Am J Cardiol.2005;96:10021006.
  11. Duvall WL,Croft LB,Goldman ME.Can hand‐carried ultrasound devices be extended for use by the noncardiology medical community?Echocardiography.2003;20:471476.
  12. Lucas BP,Kumapley R,Mba B, et al.A hospitalist‐run short stay unit: features that predict patients' length‐of‐stay and eventual admission to traditional inpatient services.J Hosp Med.2009;4:276284.
  13. McDonald ME.Adult echocardiography scanning protocol. In: Templin BB, ed.Ultrasound Scanning: Principles and Protocols.2nd ed.Philadelphia, PA:Saunders;1999:426.
  14. Beller GA,Bonow RO,Fuster V, et al.ACCF 2008 Recommendations for training in adult cardiovascular medicine core cardiology training (COCATS 3) (revision of the 2002 COCATS training statement).J Am Coll Cardiol.2008;51:333414.
  15. Oh JK,Seward JB,Tajik AJ.The Echo Manual.2nd ed.Philadelphia, PA:Lippincott Williams 1999.
  16. Kuecherer HF,Kee LL,Modin G, et al.Echocardiography in serial evaluation of left ventricular systolic and diastolic function: importance of image acquisition, quantitation, and physiologic variability in clinical and investigational applications.J Am Soc Echocardiogr.1991;4:203214.
  17. Otto CM.Textbook of Clinical Echocardiography.3rd ed.Philadelphia, PA:Elsevier Saunders;2004.
  18. Simel DL,Samsa GP,Matchar DB.Likelihood ratios with confidence: sample size estimation for diagnostic test studies.J Clin Epidemiol.1991;44:763770.
  19. Hunt SA,Abraham WT,Chin MH, et al.ACC/AHA 2005 guideline update for the diagnosis and management of chronic heart failure in the adult: a report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force on Practice Guidelines.Circulation.2005;112;154235.
  20. Bonow RO,Carabello BA,Chatterjee K, et al.ACC/AHA 2006 guidelines for the management of patients with valvular heart disease: a report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force on Practice Guidelines.Circulation.2006;114:e84e231.
  21. Abhayaratna WP,Seward JB,Appleton CP, et al.Left atrial size: physiologic determinants and clinical applications.J Am Coll Cardiol.2006;47:23572363.
  22. Levy D,Garrison RJ,Savage DD,Kannel WB,Castelli WP.Prognostic implications of echocardiographically determined left ventricular mass in the Framingham Heart Study.N Engl J Med.1990;322:15611566.
  23. Roy CL,Minor MA,Brookhart MA,Choudhry NK.Does this patient with a pericardial effusion have cardiac tamponade?JAMA.2007;297:18101818.
  24. Spodick DH.Acute cardiac tamponade.N Engl J Med.2003;349:685690.
  25. Moreno FL,Hagan AD,Holmen JR,Pryor TA,Strickland RD,Castle CH.Evaluation of size and dynamics of the inferior vena cava as an index of right‐sided cardiac function.Am J Cardiol.1984;53:579585.
  26. Begg CB,Greenes RA,Iglewicz B.The influence of uninterpretability on the assessment of diagnostic tests.J Chronic Dis.1986;39:575584.
  27. Poynard T,Chaput J‐C,Etienne J‐P.Relations between effectiveness of a diagnostic test, prevalence of the disease, and percentages of uninterpretable results. An example in the diagnosis of jaundice.Med Decis Making.1982;2:285297.
  28. Koopman PAR.Confidence intervals for the ratio of two binomial proportions.Biometrics.1984;40:513517.
  29. DeLong ER,DeLong DM,Clarke‐Pearson DL.Comparing the areas under two or more correlated receiver operating curves: a nonparametric approach.Biometrics.1988;44:837845.
  30. Gheorghiade M,Abraham WT,Albert NM, et al.Systolic blood pressure at admission, clinical characteristics, and outcomes in patients hospitalized with acute heart failure.JAMA.2006;296:22172226.
  31. Thomas JT,Kelly RF,Thomas SJ, et al.Utility of history, physical examination, electrocardiogram, and chest radiograph for differentiating normal from decreased systolic function in patients with heart failure.Am J Med.2002;112:437445.
  32. Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. Health Care Quality Data Download Website. Available at: http://www.healthcarequalitydata.org. Accessed December2008.
  33. Bossuyt PM,Reitsma JB,Burns DE, et al.Towards complete and accurate reporting of studies of diagnostic accuracy: the STARD initiative.Clin Chem.2003;49:16.
  34. Christensen CM,Bohmer R,Kenagy J.Will disruptive innovations cure health care?Harv Bus Rev.2000;78:102112.
  35. Lang RM,Bierig M,Devereux RB, et al.Recommendations for chamber quantification: a report from the American Society of Echocardiography's Guidelines and Standards Committee and the Chamber Quantification Writing Group, developed in conjunction with the European Association of Echocardiography, a branch of the European Society of Cardiology.J Am Soc Echocardiogr.2005;18:14401463.
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Impact of a Bedside Procedure Service

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Impact of a bedside procedure service on general medicine inpatients: A firm‐based trial

Inpatient bedside procedures are a major source of preventable adverse events in hospitals.1, 2 Unfortunately, many future inpatient physicians may lack the training3 and confidence4 to correct this problem. One proposed model for improving the teaching, performance, and evaluation of bedside procedures is a procedure service that is staffed by faculty who are experts at inpatient procedures.5 In a recent survey of internal medicine residents from our hospital, 86% (30 of 35) believed that expert supervision would improve central venous catheterization technique (Trick WE, personal communication).

Primary considerations in the development of a procedure service are the baseline demand for bedside procedures and whether a procedure service may affect this demand. Though variations in population‐based rates of some hospital procedures have been described,6, 7 there is little written on the demand for procedures performed at the bedsides of inpatients. Concomitant increases in demand and availability of other technologies810 suggest that improving the availability of bedside procedures may lead to an increase in their demand, regardless of whether such an increase benefits patients.11

Therefore, we sought to determine the impact of a bedside procedure service on the baseline number of paracenteses, thoracenteses, lumbar punctures (LPs), and central venous catheterizations (CVCs) performed on general medicine inpatients at our teaching hospital. In addition, we examined whether this service leads to more successful and safe procedure attempts.

METHODS

Design and Setting

In this prospective cohort study, the cohort was all patients admitted to the general medicine service at Cook County Hospital, a 500‐bed public teaching hospital in Chicago, Illinois, in January and February of 2006. The general medicine inpatient service is divided into 3 firms (A, B, and C), each with 4 separate teams of physicians and students. Admissions from the emergency department or other services in the hospital, such as intensive care units (which are closed and therefore staffed by separate teams of physicians), are distributed in sequence to on‐call teams from each firm. During the study period, the availability of a bedside procedure service varied by firm. Throughout the first 4 weeks, the service was available to only 1 of 3 firms (firm A). Then, during weeks 5 through 8, the service crossed over to the other 2 firms (firms B and C) and was unavailable to the original firm. Firm assignments for residents assigned to the inpatient service for all 8 weeks did not change. Of the 16 residents assigned to firm A during the first 4 weeks, when the procedure service was available, 3 remained on the wards during the second 4 weeks, when the procedure service was not available.

We chose to collect data on 4 bedside procedures: paracentesis, thoracentesis, LP, and CVC. Similar to those at other teaching hospitals, our residents informally acquire the skills to perform these procedures while assisting and being assisted by more experienced senior residents in a see one, do one, teach one apprenticeship model of learning.4 To improve the training and performance of these bedside procedures, the Department of Medicine piloted a bedside procedure service to teach procedural skills and assist residents during these procedures. Use of the service, though voluntary, was actively encouraged at residents' monthly orientation meetings and regular conferences.

One attending inpatient physician (J.A.) staffed the bedside procedure service, which was available during normal work hours on weekdays. Requests for procedures were made by general medicine residents through an online database and, after approval by the procedure service attending physician, were performed under his direct supervision. A hand‐carried ultrasound (MicroMaxx, Sonosite, Inc., Bothell, WA) that generates a 2‐dimensional gray‐scale image was used to both confirm the presence and location of fluid prior to paracentesis and thoracentesis and provide real‐time guidance during central venous catheterization. When the bedside procedure service was unavailable, residents performed bedside procedures in the usual fashion, typically without direct attending physician supervision. But if requested, an on‐call chief medical resident with access to a hand‐carried ultrasound device used by the intensive care unit was available for assistance at any time.

Subjects

The study subjects were all patients admitted to the general medical service during the 8‐week pilot period. Patients were excluded if they had been discharged before arrival on the medical wards or if they were under the care of the general medicine service for less than 6 hours before discharge or transfer to another service. We chose 6 hours because we reasoned that such brief admissions were not potential candidates for invasive bedside procedures.

Data Collection

Each morning an investigator contacted the senior residents who had admitted patients during the previous 24‐hour shift and confirmed that newly admitted patients were under the care of the general medicine service for more than 6 hours. To examine how the number of attempts may have been affected by procedures done in the emergency room or intensive care units before admission to the general medicine service, investigators also asked admitting residents whether a bedside procedure had been attempted in the 72 hours before admission. Every general medicine service resident was asked to fill out a brief data collection form after an attempt to perform any procedure on the general medical wards. In addition, chief residents asked each member of the general medicine service at mandatory sign‐out rounds at the end of each weekday whether any procedures had been attempted, and on weekend days investigators contacted senior residents from each general medicine service team.

We report on this quality assurance study, which was conducted during a pilot phase. This report has been reviewed and judged exempt by our institutional review board.

Primary OutcomeNumber of Procedure Attempts

For all bedside procedures attempted by residents on the general medical wards, investigators determined whether the residents were members of firms that were offered the bedside procedure service and, if so, whether the procedure service attending directly supervised the procedure attempt. Multiple procedure attempts of the same type were counted for an individual patient if (1) the procedure attempts did not occur during the same admissions and (2) neither the physicians attempting the procedure nor the primary indications for it were the same. Therefore, neither attempts performed after initially unsuccessful ones nor repeated procedures, such as large‐volume therapeutic paracentesis and thoracentesis, were counted twice. We reasoned that when these criteria were met, procedure attempts could be considered independently.

Secondary Outcomes

Investigators asked residents who attempted procedures to indicate whether (1) the indication for the procedure was solely diagnostic or was, at least in part, therapeutic; (2) the procedure was successful; and (3) there were any immediate major periprocedural complications. A procedure was considered to have been successfully performed if it fulfilled 2 criteria: it had to be completed during a single continuous attempt, even if multiple sites or procedure kits were used; and it had to fulfill the indication for it being done. For example, if the indication for thoracentesis was therapeutic, this procedure would be considered successful if it yielded a large enough volume of fluid to alleviate the patient's symptoms, but if the indication was diagnostic, then thoracentesis would be considered successful if it yielded enough fluid for laboratory processing. Residents were asked to report any periprocedural complications that they considered major; 2 illustrative examples were provided: a pneumothorax and severe bleeding.

Data Analyses

On the basis of earlier pilot data, we estimated that 8%10% of all admissions to the general medicine service underwent at least 1 procedure (paracentesis, thoracentesis, lumbar puncture, or central vein catheterization). We planned for a sample size of 1900 admissions, which would have 80% power to detect a clinically meaningful 50% relative increase in the mean number of bedside procedures with a double‐sided alpha error of 0.05. We used permutation tests to compare the mean number of procedures attempted between firms and bootstrap simulation to construct 95% confidence intervals for those means and the differences between and ratios of them. Fisher's exact test was used to compare proportions of successfully performed procedures and preadmission procedure attempts. All analyses were conducted with Stata Statistical Software, Release 9 (StataCorp, LP, College Station, TX).

RESULTS

Subjects

During this 8‐week pilot study, there were 2157 admissions to the general medicine service. Among these admissions, 216 were excluded from our study because the patients did not arrive on the medical wards or were not under the care of the general medicine service for at least 6 hours before discharge or before being transferred to another service. Of the remaining 1941 admissions, 935 were to firms with the bedside procedure service available, and 1006 were to firms without the service available (Fig. 1)

Figure 1
Study flow diagram and primary outcome.

Primary OutcomeNumber of Procedure Attempts

Overall, 122 patients underwent 145 procedure attempts that met our criteria for independence. The mean number of procedure attempts in firms offered the bedside procedure service was 48% higher (90 versus 61 per 1000 admissions; RR 1.48, 95% CI 1.062.10; P = .030; Fig. 1). When procedures attempted on weekends and holidays were excluded, the relative increase in procedure attempts in firms offered the bedside procedure service was even higher (70 versus 43 per 1000 admissions; RR 1.63, 95% CI 1.092.49; P = .023; Fig. 1). When grouped according to whether procedure attempts occurred before or after crossover of the procedure service, the mean number of procedure attempts in firms was higher when the service was offered: firm A dropped from 84 to 70 per 1000 admissions (P = .58) after losing the service, whereas firms B and C increased from 57 to 94 per 1000 admissions (P = .025) on gaining the service. There were 40 procedure attempts performed on patients within 72 hours before admission, but there was no difference between firms in the proportions of these preadmission procedures (P = .43).

Secondary Outcomes

Table 1 shows how of each type of procedure contributed to the overall difference. Attempts of CVC and therapeutic paracentesis and thoracentesis accounted for 86% of the overall increase in procedure attempts for admissions to firms offered the bedside procedure service, whereas only 14% of this increase was a result of diagnostic procedures. There were no differences in the proportions of successfully performed procedures, whether grouped by firm (P = 1.0) or by direct supervision from the procedure service attending (P = .64; Table 2). There were 3 self‐reported major periprocedural complications; all were related to excessive bleeding from CVC attempts. Two occurred without direct supervision from the bedside procedure service attending, one hemomediastinum from an internal jugular CVC attempt and one groin hematoma from a femoral CVC attempt. The third, a groin hematoma from a femoral CVC attempt, occurred during direct supervision from the bedside procedure service attending.

Rate of Procedure Attempts (per 1000 admissions) for Firms with Bedside Procedure Service and for Firms with Usual Care
Bedside procedure and indicationFirms with bedside procedure service 935 admissionsFirms with usual care 1006 admissionsAbsolute rate difference (proportion of overall difference)*
Total for entire study (total for weekend days and holidays)
  • Absolute differences and proportions are subject to rounding errors. P value for overall mean difference was .030. All subgroup P values > .05.

Total90 (19)61 (18)29 (100%)
Thoracentesis30 (10)18 (7)12 (41%)
Diagnosis9 (5)6 (2)3 (9%)
Treatment21 (4)12 (5)9 (32%)
Paracentesis32 (5)25 (6)7 (25%)
Diagnosis9 (1)11 (3)2 (8%)
Treatment24 (4)14 (3)10 (33%)
Central venous catheterization17 (3)11 (4)6 (21%)
Lumbar puncture11 (1)7 (1)4 (13%)
Diagnosis10 (1)6 (1)4 (13%)
Treatment1 (0)1 (0)0 (0%)
Proportions of Procedure Attempts Successful by Availability of Procedure Service and Direct Supervision by Procedure Service Attending*
 Admission to firm withP value of difference in proportions
Procedure service availableUsual care
Total attempts (n)SuccessfulTotal attempts (n)Successful
n%n%
  • Two successful procedure attempts in firms with usual care were performed by Firm A residents who had been supervised by the procedure service attending while attempting the same type of procedure before the crossover.

  • Of the 84 procedures attempted by firms offered the bedside procedure service, 34 were without direct supervision from the bedside procedure service attending, because the procedures were performed during the weekend (18), performed urgently during off‐hours (13), or requested too late in the day (3).

Central venous catheterization161381119821.00
Paracentesis, thoracentesis, or lumbar puncture6854795040801.00
Total8467806149801.00
 Procedure service attendingPvalue of difference in proportions
Directly supervisedDid not directly supervise
Total attempts (n)SuccessfulTotal attempts (n)Successful
n%n%
Central venous catheterization10101001712710.28
Paracentesis, thoracentesis, or lumbar puncture4033837861780.12
Total5043869573770.64

DISCUSSION

We found that the mean number of bedside procedures increased by 48% (95% CI, 6% to 110%) from 61 to 90 per 1000 general medicine admissions when firms were offered a bedside procedure service. This suggests that a procedure service may lead to an increase in the number of procedures performed. For example, in our hospital, where 12,500 patients are admitted annually to the general medical service, 365 additional procedures per year (95% CI, 45840) may be performed if a procedure service is available. Despite this potential increase in demand, we were unable to demonstrate a parallel increase in bedside procedure success, even when the procedure service attending was directly supervising residents (Table 2). Though our conclusions may not be applicable to other settings, this study is, to our knowledge, the first to describe the demand for bedside procedures performed on general medicine inpatients at an urban teaching hospital and the first to demonstrate that this demand increases with the availability of a procedure service.

Because 86% of the observed increase in procedure attempts was due to therapeutic indications (Table 1), most of the observed difference may be due to undertreatment in the usual care cohort, overtreatment in the bedside procedure service cohort, or a combination of both. However, our study was not designed to determine if patients were undertreated because we did not review the appropriateness of physicians' decisions to not attempt procedures. And even though the bedside procedure service attending physician prospectively confirmed the appropriateness of each procedure attempt in that cohort, we did not examine what physicians' baseline treatment thresholds were or if they were lowered by the availability of the bedside procedure service.11 In other words, we cannot claim that the observed increase in procedure attempts was indicated based on patients' clinical factors. Nevertheless, the observed increase supports the important idea that discrete physician‐level decisions, in this case, whether to perform a bedside procedure, may be affected by broader system‐wide adoptions of new technologies like our bedside procedure service.12 Other nonclinical factors not observed in our study, such as fee‐for‐service compensation and variable physician‐level diagnostic and therapeutic thresholds, may also affect the rate of bedside procedures.

Our study had several limitations. We studied only one group of patients at one hospital: admissions to physicians in different settings may have different rates of bedside procedures. Our study design was observational. However, the predetermined sequential allocation of admissions and the varied assignments of the bedside procedure service during the study period should have limited selection bias. Our identification of procedure attempts, particularly in the usual care group, relied on resident physicians' self‐reports, and we cannot exclude a reporting bias. However, we believe that the daily interactions between investigators and residents from each team on the general medicine service limited the number of procedure attempts that went unrecorded. Finally, though sufficiently powered to determine our primary outcome, our study was underpowered to confirm statistical differences between firms in proportions of successfully performed procedures. For example, approximately 400 additional procedures (or more than 5000 additional admissions) would have been needed to sufficiently power the observed 9% increase in successful attempts that we observed with direct supervision by the procedure service attending (77% versus 86%; P = .64; Table 2). Our current sample size may be adequate in future research if success rates diverge as the experience of the procedure service attending increases. Though expert in performing bedside procedures, he had limited experience teaching them, particularly with the use of a hand‐carried ultrasound device. Just as there is a learning curve to gain the experience to successfully perform procedures,13 so may there be a learning curve to successfully teach procedures.14

Future research could address these limitations by more closely observing the decision‐making processes of physicians who order bedside procedures for general medicine inpatients in various settings. Our findings suggest that although patients' clinical circumstances are likely the most important consideration, nonclinical factors may also affect physicians' decisions.12 Like other multifaceted decision‐making processes of physicians,15 the complexity of this decision is important to examine because, as our pilot data suggest, a procedure service may not lead to more successful procedure attempts or reductions in the number of major complications. Although the cumulative expertise of our service or the innovative methods of training of other institutions may improve the performance of bedside procedures,5, 13 physicians' decisions about whether to order them will remain paramount, because any improvement in procedural competence will do little to reduce the relative danger of unnecessary procedures16 or the missed benefit of procedures left undone. Physicians of inpatients17, 18 should refine the indications for and anticipated benefits from these commonly performed invasive procedures.

References
  1. Leape LL,Brennan TA,Laird N, et al.The nature of adverse events in hospitalized patients: Results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study II.N Engl J Med.1991;324:377384.
  2. Thomas EJ,Studdert DM,Newhouse JP, et al.Cost of medical injuries in Utah and Colorado.Inquiry.36;255264.
  3. Wigton RS,Blank LL,Nicolas JA,Tape TG.Procedural Skills Training in Internal Medicine Residencies: A Survey of Program Directors.Ann Intern Med1989;111:93238.
  4. Huang GC,Smith CC,Gordon CE, et al.Beyond the comfort zone: residents assess their comfort performing inpatient medicine procedures.Am J Med.2006;119:71.e17.e24.
  5. Smith CC,Gordon CE,Feller‐Kopman D, et al.Creation of an innovative inpatient medical procedure service and a method to evaluate house staff competency.J Gen Intern Med.2004;19:510513.
  6. Guadagnoli E,Hauptman PJ,Ayanian JZ, et al.Variation in the use of cardiac procedures after acute myocardial infarction.N Engl J Med.1995;333:573578.
  7. Schroeder SA,Marton KI,Strom BL.Frequency and morbidity of inpatient procedures: report of a pilot study from two teaching hospitals.Arch Intern Med.1978;138:18091811.
  8. Verrilli D,Welch HG.The impact of diagnostic testing on therapeutic interventions.JAMA.1996;275:11891191.
  9. Weinberger M,Oddone EZ,Henderson WG, et al.Does increased access to primary care reduce hospital readmissions?N Engl J Med.1996;334:14411447.
  10. Tu JV,Naylor CD,Kumar D, et al.Coronary artery bypass graft surgery in Ontario and New York State: which rate is right?Ann Intern Med.1997;126:1319.
  11. Fisher ES,Welch HG.Avoiding the unintended consequences of growth in medical care. How might more be worse?JAMA.1999;281:446453.
  12. Wennberg JE,Barnes BA,Zubkoff M.Professional uncertainty and the problem of supplier‐induced demand.Soc Sci Med.1982;811824.
  13. Ramakrishna G,Higano ST,McDonald FS,Shultz HJ.A curricular initiative for internal medicine residents to enhance proficiency in internal jugular central venous line placement.Mayo Clin Proc.2005;80:212218.
  14. Wickstrom GC,Kelley DK,Keyserling TC, et al.Confidence of Academic General Internists and Family Physicians to Teach Ambulatory Procedures.J Gen Intern Med.2000;15:353360.
  15. Lucas BP,Evans AT,Reilly BM, et al.The impact of evidence on physicians' inpatient treatment decisions.J Gen Intern Med.2004;19:402409.
  16. Fisher ES.Medical care—is more always better?N Engl J Med.2003;349:16651667.
  17. Aronson MD,Nelson JR.Point/counterpoint: should hospital medicine become a distinct specialty?Hospitalist.2005;9(1):1519.
  18. Pistoria MJ,Amin AN,Dressler DD,McKean SCW,Budnitz TL.The core competencies in hospital medicine: a framework for curriculum development by the Society of Hospital Medicine.J Hospital Med.2006;1:S1S95.
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Inpatient bedside procedures are a major source of preventable adverse events in hospitals.1, 2 Unfortunately, many future inpatient physicians may lack the training3 and confidence4 to correct this problem. One proposed model for improving the teaching, performance, and evaluation of bedside procedures is a procedure service that is staffed by faculty who are experts at inpatient procedures.5 In a recent survey of internal medicine residents from our hospital, 86% (30 of 35) believed that expert supervision would improve central venous catheterization technique (Trick WE, personal communication).

Primary considerations in the development of a procedure service are the baseline demand for bedside procedures and whether a procedure service may affect this demand. Though variations in population‐based rates of some hospital procedures have been described,6, 7 there is little written on the demand for procedures performed at the bedsides of inpatients. Concomitant increases in demand and availability of other technologies810 suggest that improving the availability of bedside procedures may lead to an increase in their demand, regardless of whether such an increase benefits patients.11

Therefore, we sought to determine the impact of a bedside procedure service on the baseline number of paracenteses, thoracenteses, lumbar punctures (LPs), and central venous catheterizations (CVCs) performed on general medicine inpatients at our teaching hospital. In addition, we examined whether this service leads to more successful and safe procedure attempts.

METHODS

Design and Setting

In this prospective cohort study, the cohort was all patients admitted to the general medicine service at Cook County Hospital, a 500‐bed public teaching hospital in Chicago, Illinois, in January and February of 2006. The general medicine inpatient service is divided into 3 firms (A, B, and C), each with 4 separate teams of physicians and students. Admissions from the emergency department or other services in the hospital, such as intensive care units (which are closed and therefore staffed by separate teams of physicians), are distributed in sequence to on‐call teams from each firm. During the study period, the availability of a bedside procedure service varied by firm. Throughout the first 4 weeks, the service was available to only 1 of 3 firms (firm A). Then, during weeks 5 through 8, the service crossed over to the other 2 firms (firms B and C) and was unavailable to the original firm. Firm assignments for residents assigned to the inpatient service for all 8 weeks did not change. Of the 16 residents assigned to firm A during the first 4 weeks, when the procedure service was available, 3 remained on the wards during the second 4 weeks, when the procedure service was not available.

We chose to collect data on 4 bedside procedures: paracentesis, thoracentesis, LP, and CVC. Similar to those at other teaching hospitals, our residents informally acquire the skills to perform these procedures while assisting and being assisted by more experienced senior residents in a see one, do one, teach one apprenticeship model of learning.4 To improve the training and performance of these bedside procedures, the Department of Medicine piloted a bedside procedure service to teach procedural skills and assist residents during these procedures. Use of the service, though voluntary, was actively encouraged at residents' monthly orientation meetings and regular conferences.

One attending inpatient physician (J.A.) staffed the bedside procedure service, which was available during normal work hours on weekdays. Requests for procedures were made by general medicine residents through an online database and, after approval by the procedure service attending physician, were performed under his direct supervision. A hand‐carried ultrasound (MicroMaxx, Sonosite, Inc., Bothell, WA) that generates a 2‐dimensional gray‐scale image was used to both confirm the presence and location of fluid prior to paracentesis and thoracentesis and provide real‐time guidance during central venous catheterization. When the bedside procedure service was unavailable, residents performed bedside procedures in the usual fashion, typically without direct attending physician supervision. But if requested, an on‐call chief medical resident with access to a hand‐carried ultrasound device used by the intensive care unit was available for assistance at any time.

Subjects

The study subjects were all patients admitted to the general medical service during the 8‐week pilot period. Patients were excluded if they had been discharged before arrival on the medical wards or if they were under the care of the general medicine service for less than 6 hours before discharge or transfer to another service. We chose 6 hours because we reasoned that such brief admissions were not potential candidates for invasive bedside procedures.

Data Collection

Each morning an investigator contacted the senior residents who had admitted patients during the previous 24‐hour shift and confirmed that newly admitted patients were under the care of the general medicine service for more than 6 hours. To examine how the number of attempts may have been affected by procedures done in the emergency room or intensive care units before admission to the general medicine service, investigators also asked admitting residents whether a bedside procedure had been attempted in the 72 hours before admission. Every general medicine service resident was asked to fill out a brief data collection form after an attempt to perform any procedure on the general medical wards. In addition, chief residents asked each member of the general medicine service at mandatory sign‐out rounds at the end of each weekday whether any procedures had been attempted, and on weekend days investigators contacted senior residents from each general medicine service team.

We report on this quality assurance study, which was conducted during a pilot phase. This report has been reviewed and judged exempt by our institutional review board.

Primary OutcomeNumber of Procedure Attempts

For all bedside procedures attempted by residents on the general medical wards, investigators determined whether the residents were members of firms that were offered the bedside procedure service and, if so, whether the procedure service attending directly supervised the procedure attempt. Multiple procedure attempts of the same type were counted for an individual patient if (1) the procedure attempts did not occur during the same admissions and (2) neither the physicians attempting the procedure nor the primary indications for it were the same. Therefore, neither attempts performed after initially unsuccessful ones nor repeated procedures, such as large‐volume therapeutic paracentesis and thoracentesis, were counted twice. We reasoned that when these criteria were met, procedure attempts could be considered independently.

Secondary Outcomes

Investigators asked residents who attempted procedures to indicate whether (1) the indication for the procedure was solely diagnostic or was, at least in part, therapeutic; (2) the procedure was successful; and (3) there were any immediate major periprocedural complications. A procedure was considered to have been successfully performed if it fulfilled 2 criteria: it had to be completed during a single continuous attempt, even if multiple sites or procedure kits were used; and it had to fulfill the indication for it being done. For example, if the indication for thoracentesis was therapeutic, this procedure would be considered successful if it yielded a large enough volume of fluid to alleviate the patient's symptoms, but if the indication was diagnostic, then thoracentesis would be considered successful if it yielded enough fluid for laboratory processing. Residents were asked to report any periprocedural complications that they considered major; 2 illustrative examples were provided: a pneumothorax and severe bleeding.

Data Analyses

On the basis of earlier pilot data, we estimated that 8%10% of all admissions to the general medicine service underwent at least 1 procedure (paracentesis, thoracentesis, lumbar puncture, or central vein catheterization). We planned for a sample size of 1900 admissions, which would have 80% power to detect a clinically meaningful 50% relative increase in the mean number of bedside procedures with a double‐sided alpha error of 0.05. We used permutation tests to compare the mean number of procedures attempted between firms and bootstrap simulation to construct 95% confidence intervals for those means and the differences between and ratios of them. Fisher's exact test was used to compare proportions of successfully performed procedures and preadmission procedure attempts. All analyses were conducted with Stata Statistical Software, Release 9 (StataCorp, LP, College Station, TX).

RESULTS

Subjects

During this 8‐week pilot study, there were 2157 admissions to the general medicine service. Among these admissions, 216 were excluded from our study because the patients did not arrive on the medical wards or were not under the care of the general medicine service for at least 6 hours before discharge or before being transferred to another service. Of the remaining 1941 admissions, 935 were to firms with the bedside procedure service available, and 1006 were to firms without the service available (Fig. 1)

Figure 1
Study flow diagram and primary outcome.

Primary OutcomeNumber of Procedure Attempts

Overall, 122 patients underwent 145 procedure attempts that met our criteria for independence. The mean number of procedure attempts in firms offered the bedside procedure service was 48% higher (90 versus 61 per 1000 admissions; RR 1.48, 95% CI 1.062.10; P = .030; Fig. 1). When procedures attempted on weekends and holidays were excluded, the relative increase in procedure attempts in firms offered the bedside procedure service was even higher (70 versus 43 per 1000 admissions; RR 1.63, 95% CI 1.092.49; P = .023; Fig. 1). When grouped according to whether procedure attempts occurred before or after crossover of the procedure service, the mean number of procedure attempts in firms was higher when the service was offered: firm A dropped from 84 to 70 per 1000 admissions (P = .58) after losing the service, whereas firms B and C increased from 57 to 94 per 1000 admissions (P = .025) on gaining the service. There were 40 procedure attempts performed on patients within 72 hours before admission, but there was no difference between firms in the proportions of these preadmission procedures (P = .43).

Secondary Outcomes

Table 1 shows how of each type of procedure contributed to the overall difference. Attempts of CVC and therapeutic paracentesis and thoracentesis accounted for 86% of the overall increase in procedure attempts for admissions to firms offered the bedside procedure service, whereas only 14% of this increase was a result of diagnostic procedures. There were no differences in the proportions of successfully performed procedures, whether grouped by firm (P = 1.0) or by direct supervision from the procedure service attending (P = .64; Table 2). There were 3 self‐reported major periprocedural complications; all were related to excessive bleeding from CVC attempts. Two occurred without direct supervision from the bedside procedure service attending, one hemomediastinum from an internal jugular CVC attempt and one groin hematoma from a femoral CVC attempt. The third, a groin hematoma from a femoral CVC attempt, occurred during direct supervision from the bedside procedure service attending.

Rate of Procedure Attempts (per 1000 admissions) for Firms with Bedside Procedure Service and for Firms with Usual Care
Bedside procedure and indicationFirms with bedside procedure service 935 admissionsFirms with usual care 1006 admissionsAbsolute rate difference (proportion of overall difference)*
Total for entire study (total for weekend days and holidays)
  • Absolute differences and proportions are subject to rounding errors. P value for overall mean difference was .030. All subgroup P values > .05.

Total90 (19)61 (18)29 (100%)
Thoracentesis30 (10)18 (7)12 (41%)
Diagnosis9 (5)6 (2)3 (9%)
Treatment21 (4)12 (5)9 (32%)
Paracentesis32 (5)25 (6)7 (25%)
Diagnosis9 (1)11 (3)2 (8%)
Treatment24 (4)14 (3)10 (33%)
Central venous catheterization17 (3)11 (4)6 (21%)
Lumbar puncture11 (1)7 (1)4 (13%)
Diagnosis10 (1)6 (1)4 (13%)
Treatment1 (0)1 (0)0 (0%)
Proportions of Procedure Attempts Successful by Availability of Procedure Service and Direct Supervision by Procedure Service Attending*
 Admission to firm withP value of difference in proportions
Procedure service availableUsual care
Total attempts (n)SuccessfulTotal attempts (n)Successful
n%n%
  • Two successful procedure attempts in firms with usual care were performed by Firm A residents who had been supervised by the procedure service attending while attempting the same type of procedure before the crossover.

  • Of the 84 procedures attempted by firms offered the bedside procedure service, 34 were without direct supervision from the bedside procedure service attending, because the procedures were performed during the weekend (18), performed urgently during off‐hours (13), or requested too late in the day (3).

Central venous catheterization161381119821.00
Paracentesis, thoracentesis, or lumbar puncture6854795040801.00
Total8467806149801.00
 Procedure service attendingPvalue of difference in proportions
Directly supervisedDid not directly supervise
Total attempts (n)SuccessfulTotal attempts (n)Successful
n%n%
Central venous catheterization10101001712710.28
Paracentesis, thoracentesis, or lumbar puncture4033837861780.12
Total5043869573770.64

DISCUSSION

We found that the mean number of bedside procedures increased by 48% (95% CI, 6% to 110%) from 61 to 90 per 1000 general medicine admissions when firms were offered a bedside procedure service. This suggests that a procedure service may lead to an increase in the number of procedures performed. For example, in our hospital, where 12,500 patients are admitted annually to the general medical service, 365 additional procedures per year (95% CI, 45840) may be performed if a procedure service is available. Despite this potential increase in demand, we were unable to demonstrate a parallel increase in bedside procedure success, even when the procedure service attending was directly supervising residents (Table 2). Though our conclusions may not be applicable to other settings, this study is, to our knowledge, the first to describe the demand for bedside procedures performed on general medicine inpatients at an urban teaching hospital and the first to demonstrate that this demand increases with the availability of a procedure service.

Because 86% of the observed increase in procedure attempts was due to therapeutic indications (Table 1), most of the observed difference may be due to undertreatment in the usual care cohort, overtreatment in the bedside procedure service cohort, or a combination of both. However, our study was not designed to determine if patients were undertreated because we did not review the appropriateness of physicians' decisions to not attempt procedures. And even though the bedside procedure service attending physician prospectively confirmed the appropriateness of each procedure attempt in that cohort, we did not examine what physicians' baseline treatment thresholds were or if they were lowered by the availability of the bedside procedure service.11 In other words, we cannot claim that the observed increase in procedure attempts was indicated based on patients' clinical factors. Nevertheless, the observed increase supports the important idea that discrete physician‐level decisions, in this case, whether to perform a bedside procedure, may be affected by broader system‐wide adoptions of new technologies like our bedside procedure service.12 Other nonclinical factors not observed in our study, such as fee‐for‐service compensation and variable physician‐level diagnostic and therapeutic thresholds, may also affect the rate of bedside procedures.

Our study had several limitations. We studied only one group of patients at one hospital: admissions to physicians in different settings may have different rates of bedside procedures. Our study design was observational. However, the predetermined sequential allocation of admissions and the varied assignments of the bedside procedure service during the study period should have limited selection bias. Our identification of procedure attempts, particularly in the usual care group, relied on resident physicians' self‐reports, and we cannot exclude a reporting bias. However, we believe that the daily interactions between investigators and residents from each team on the general medicine service limited the number of procedure attempts that went unrecorded. Finally, though sufficiently powered to determine our primary outcome, our study was underpowered to confirm statistical differences between firms in proportions of successfully performed procedures. For example, approximately 400 additional procedures (or more than 5000 additional admissions) would have been needed to sufficiently power the observed 9% increase in successful attempts that we observed with direct supervision by the procedure service attending (77% versus 86%; P = .64; Table 2). Our current sample size may be adequate in future research if success rates diverge as the experience of the procedure service attending increases. Though expert in performing bedside procedures, he had limited experience teaching them, particularly with the use of a hand‐carried ultrasound device. Just as there is a learning curve to gain the experience to successfully perform procedures,13 so may there be a learning curve to successfully teach procedures.14

Future research could address these limitations by more closely observing the decision‐making processes of physicians who order bedside procedures for general medicine inpatients in various settings. Our findings suggest that although patients' clinical circumstances are likely the most important consideration, nonclinical factors may also affect physicians' decisions.12 Like other multifaceted decision‐making processes of physicians,15 the complexity of this decision is important to examine because, as our pilot data suggest, a procedure service may not lead to more successful procedure attempts or reductions in the number of major complications. Although the cumulative expertise of our service or the innovative methods of training of other institutions may improve the performance of bedside procedures,5, 13 physicians' decisions about whether to order them will remain paramount, because any improvement in procedural competence will do little to reduce the relative danger of unnecessary procedures16 or the missed benefit of procedures left undone. Physicians of inpatients17, 18 should refine the indications for and anticipated benefits from these commonly performed invasive procedures.

Inpatient bedside procedures are a major source of preventable adverse events in hospitals.1, 2 Unfortunately, many future inpatient physicians may lack the training3 and confidence4 to correct this problem. One proposed model for improving the teaching, performance, and evaluation of bedside procedures is a procedure service that is staffed by faculty who are experts at inpatient procedures.5 In a recent survey of internal medicine residents from our hospital, 86% (30 of 35) believed that expert supervision would improve central venous catheterization technique (Trick WE, personal communication).

Primary considerations in the development of a procedure service are the baseline demand for bedside procedures and whether a procedure service may affect this demand. Though variations in population‐based rates of some hospital procedures have been described,6, 7 there is little written on the demand for procedures performed at the bedsides of inpatients. Concomitant increases in demand and availability of other technologies810 suggest that improving the availability of bedside procedures may lead to an increase in their demand, regardless of whether such an increase benefits patients.11

Therefore, we sought to determine the impact of a bedside procedure service on the baseline number of paracenteses, thoracenteses, lumbar punctures (LPs), and central venous catheterizations (CVCs) performed on general medicine inpatients at our teaching hospital. In addition, we examined whether this service leads to more successful and safe procedure attempts.

METHODS

Design and Setting

In this prospective cohort study, the cohort was all patients admitted to the general medicine service at Cook County Hospital, a 500‐bed public teaching hospital in Chicago, Illinois, in January and February of 2006. The general medicine inpatient service is divided into 3 firms (A, B, and C), each with 4 separate teams of physicians and students. Admissions from the emergency department or other services in the hospital, such as intensive care units (which are closed and therefore staffed by separate teams of physicians), are distributed in sequence to on‐call teams from each firm. During the study period, the availability of a bedside procedure service varied by firm. Throughout the first 4 weeks, the service was available to only 1 of 3 firms (firm A). Then, during weeks 5 through 8, the service crossed over to the other 2 firms (firms B and C) and was unavailable to the original firm. Firm assignments for residents assigned to the inpatient service for all 8 weeks did not change. Of the 16 residents assigned to firm A during the first 4 weeks, when the procedure service was available, 3 remained on the wards during the second 4 weeks, when the procedure service was not available.

We chose to collect data on 4 bedside procedures: paracentesis, thoracentesis, LP, and CVC. Similar to those at other teaching hospitals, our residents informally acquire the skills to perform these procedures while assisting and being assisted by more experienced senior residents in a see one, do one, teach one apprenticeship model of learning.4 To improve the training and performance of these bedside procedures, the Department of Medicine piloted a bedside procedure service to teach procedural skills and assist residents during these procedures. Use of the service, though voluntary, was actively encouraged at residents' monthly orientation meetings and regular conferences.

One attending inpatient physician (J.A.) staffed the bedside procedure service, which was available during normal work hours on weekdays. Requests for procedures were made by general medicine residents through an online database and, after approval by the procedure service attending physician, were performed under his direct supervision. A hand‐carried ultrasound (MicroMaxx, Sonosite, Inc., Bothell, WA) that generates a 2‐dimensional gray‐scale image was used to both confirm the presence and location of fluid prior to paracentesis and thoracentesis and provide real‐time guidance during central venous catheterization. When the bedside procedure service was unavailable, residents performed bedside procedures in the usual fashion, typically without direct attending physician supervision. But if requested, an on‐call chief medical resident with access to a hand‐carried ultrasound device used by the intensive care unit was available for assistance at any time.

Subjects

The study subjects were all patients admitted to the general medical service during the 8‐week pilot period. Patients were excluded if they had been discharged before arrival on the medical wards or if they were under the care of the general medicine service for less than 6 hours before discharge or transfer to another service. We chose 6 hours because we reasoned that such brief admissions were not potential candidates for invasive bedside procedures.

Data Collection

Each morning an investigator contacted the senior residents who had admitted patients during the previous 24‐hour shift and confirmed that newly admitted patients were under the care of the general medicine service for more than 6 hours. To examine how the number of attempts may have been affected by procedures done in the emergency room or intensive care units before admission to the general medicine service, investigators also asked admitting residents whether a bedside procedure had been attempted in the 72 hours before admission. Every general medicine service resident was asked to fill out a brief data collection form after an attempt to perform any procedure on the general medical wards. In addition, chief residents asked each member of the general medicine service at mandatory sign‐out rounds at the end of each weekday whether any procedures had been attempted, and on weekend days investigators contacted senior residents from each general medicine service team.

We report on this quality assurance study, which was conducted during a pilot phase. This report has been reviewed and judged exempt by our institutional review board.

Primary OutcomeNumber of Procedure Attempts

For all bedside procedures attempted by residents on the general medical wards, investigators determined whether the residents were members of firms that were offered the bedside procedure service and, if so, whether the procedure service attending directly supervised the procedure attempt. Multiple procedure attempts of the same type were counted for an individual patient if (1) the procedure attempts did not occur during the same admissions and (2) neither the physicians attempting the procedure nor the primary indications for it were the same. Therefore, neither attempts performed after initially unsuccessful ones nor repeated procedures, such as large‐volume therapeutic paracentesis and thoracentesis, were counted twice. We reasoned that when these criteria were met, procedure attempts could be considered independently.

Secondary Outcomes

Investigators asked residents who attempted procedures to indicate whether (1) the indication for the procedure was solely diagnostic or was, at least in part, therapeutic; (2) the procedure was successful; and (3) there were any immediate major periprocedural complications. A procedure was considered to have been successfully performed if it fulfilled 2 criteria: it had to be completed during a single continuous attempt, even if multiple sites or procedure kits were used; and it had to fulfill the indication for it being done. For example, if the indication for thoracentesis was therapeutic, this procedure would be considered successful if it yielded a large enough volume of fluid to alleviate the patient's symptoms, but if the indication was diagnostic, then thoracentesis would be considered successful if it yielded enough fluid for laboratory processing. Residents were asked to report any periprocedural complications that they considered major; 2 illustrative examples were provided: a pneumothorax and severe bleeding.

Data Analyses

On the basis of earlier pilot data, we estimated that 8%10% of all admissions to the general medicine service underwent at least 1 procedure (paracentesis, thoracentesis, lumbar puncture, or central vein catheterization). We planned for a sample size of 1900 admissions, which would have 80% power to detect a clinically meaningful 50% relative increase in the mean number of bedside procedures with a double‐sided alpha error of 0.05. We used permutation tests to compare the mean number of procedures attempted between firms and bootstrap simulation to construct 95% confidence intervals for those means and the differences between and ratios of them. Fisher's exact test was used to compare proportions of successfully performed procedures and preadmission procedure attempts. All analyses were conducted with Stata Statistical Software, Release 9 (StataCorp, LP, College Station, TX).

RESULTS

Subjects

During this 8‐week pilot study, there were 2157 admissions to the general medicine service. Among these admissions, 216 were excluded from our study because the patients did not arrive on the medical wards or were not under the care of the general medicine service for at least 6 hours before discharge or before being transferred to another service. Of the remaining 1941 admissions, 935 were to firms with the bedside procedure service available, and 1006 were to firms without the service available (Fig. 1)

Figure 1
Study flow diagram and primary outcome.

Primary OutcomeNumber of Procedure Attempts

Overall, 122 patients underwent 145 procedure attempts that met our criteria for independence. The mean number of procedure attempts in firms offered the bedside procedure service was 48% higher (90 versus 61 per 1000 admissions; RR 1.48, 95% CI 1.062.10; P = .030; Fig. 1). When procedures attempted on weekends and holidays were excluded, the relative increase in procedure attempts in firms offered the bedside procedure service was even higher (70 versus 43 per 1000 admissions; RR 1.63, 95% CI 1.092.49; P = .023; Fig. 1). When grouped according to whether procedure attempts occurred before or after crossover of the procedure service, the mean number of procedure attempts in firms was higher when the service was offered: firm A dropped from 84 to 70 per 1000 admissions (P = .58) after losing the service, whereas firms B and C increased from 57 to 94 per 1000 admissions (P = .025) on gaining the service. There were 40 procedure attempts performed on patients within 72 hours before admission, but there was no difference between firms in the proportions of these preadmission procedures (P = .43).

Secondary Outcomes

Table 1 shows how of each type of procedure contributed to the overall difference. Attempts of CVC and therapeutic paracentesis and thoracentesis accounted for 86% of the overall increase in procedure attempts for admissions to firms offered the bedside procedure service, whereas only 14% of this increase was a result of diagnostic procedures. There were no differences in the proportions of successfully performed procedures, whether grouped by firm (P = 1.0) or by direct supervision from the procedure service attending (P = .64; Table 2). There were 3 self‐reported major periprocedural complications; all were related to excessive bleeding from CVC attempts. Two occurred without direct supervision from the bedside procedure service attending, one hemomediastinum from an internal jugular CVC attempt and one groin hematoma from a femoral CVC attempt. The third, a groin hematoma from a femoral CVC attempt, occurred during direct supervision from the bedside procedure service attending.

Rate of Procedure Attempts (per 1000 admissions) for Firms with Bedside Procedure Service and for Firms with Usual Care
Bedside procedure and indicationFirms with bedside procedure service 935 admissionsFirms with usual care 1006 admissionsAbsolute rate difference (proportion of overall difference)*
Total for entire study (total for weekend days and holidays)
  • Absolute differences and proportions are subject to rounding errors. P value for overall mean difference was .030. All subgroup P values > .05.

Total90 (19)61 (18)29 (100%)
Thoracentesis30 (10)18 (7)12 (41%)
Diagnosis9 (5)6 (2)3 (9%)
Treatment21 (4)12 (5)9 (32%)
Paracentesis32 (5)25 (6)7 (25%)
Diagnosis9 (1)11 (3)2 (8%)
Treatment24 (4)14 (3)10 (33%)
Central venous catheterization17 (3)11 (4)6 (21%)
Lumbar puncture11 (1)7 (1)4 (13%)
Diagnosis10 (1)6 (1)4 (13%)
Treatment1 (0)1 (0)0 (0%)
Proportions of Procedure Attempts Successful by Availability of Procedure Service and Direct Supervision by Procedure Service Attending*
 Admission to firm withP value of difference in proportions
Procedure service availableUsual care
Total attempts (n)SuccessfulTotal attempts (n)Successful
n%n%
  • Two successful procedure attempts in firms with usual care were performed by Firm A residents who had been supervised by the procedure service attending while attempting the same type of procedure before the crossover.

  • Of the 84 procedures attempted by firms offered the bedside procedure service, 34 were without direct supervision from the bedside procedure service attending, because the procedures were performed during the weekend (18), performed urgently during off‐hours (13), or requested too late in the day (3).

Central venous catheterization161381119821.00
Paracentesis, thoracentesis, or lumbar puncture6854795040801.00
Total8467806149801.00
 Procedure service attendingPvalue of difference in proportions
Directly supervisedDid not directly supervise
Total attempts (n)SuccessfulTotal attempts (n)Successful
n%n%
Central venous catheterization10101001712710.28
Paracentesis, thoracentesis, or lumbar puncture4033837861780.12
Total5043869573770.64

DISCUSSION

We found that the mean number of bedside procedures increased by 48% (95% CI, 6% to 110%) from 61 to 90 per 1000 general medicine admissions when firms were offered a bedside procedure service. This suggests that a procedure service may lead to an increase in the number of procedures performed. For example, in our hospital, where 12,500 patients are admitted annually to the general medical service, 365 additional procedures per year (95% CI, 45840) may be performed if a procedure service is available. Despite this potential increase in demand, we were unable to demonstrate a parallel increase in bedside procedure success, even when the procedure service attending was directly supervising residents (Table 2). Though our conclusions may not be applicable to other settings, this study is, to our knowledge, the first to describe the demand for bedside procedures performed on general medicine inpatients at an urban teaching hospital and the first to demonstrate that this demand increases with the availability of a procedure service.

Because 86% of the observed increase in procedure attempts was due to therapeutic indications (Table 1), most of the observed difference may be due to undertreatment in the usual care cohort, overtreatment in the bedside procedure service cohort, or a combination of both. However, our study was not designed to determine if patients were undertreated because we did not review the appropriateness of physicians' decisions to not attempt procedures. And even though the bedside procedure service attending physician prospectively confirmed the appropriateness of each procedure attempt in that cohort, we did not examine what physicians' baseline treatment thresholds were or if they were lowered by the availability of the bedside procedure service.11 In other words, we cannot claim that the observed increase in procedure attempts was indicated based on patients' clinical factors. Nevertheless, the observed increase supports the important idea that discrete physician‐level decisions, in this case, whether to perform a bedside procedure, may be affected by broader system‐wide adoptions of new technologies like our bedside procedure service.12 Other nonclinical factors not observed in our study, such as fee‐for‐service compensation and variable physician‐level diagnostic and therapeutic thresholds, may also affect the rate of bedside procedures.

Our study had several limitations. We studied only one group of patients at one hospital: admissions to physicians in different settings may have different rates of bedside procedures. Our study design was observational. However, the predetermined sequential allocation of admissions and the varied assignments of the bedside procedure service during the study period should have limited selection bias. Our identification of procedure attempts, particularly in the usual care group, relied on resident physicians' self‐reports, and we cannot exclude a reporting bias. However, we believe that the daily interactions between investigators and residents from each team on the general medicine service limited the number of procedure attempts that went unrecorded. Finally, though sufficiently powered to determine our primary outcome, our study was underpowered to confirm statistical differences between firms in proportions of successfully performed procedures. For example, approximately 400 additional procedures (or more than 5000 additional admissions) would have been needed to sufficiently power the observed 9% increase in successful attempts that we observed with direct supervision by the procedure service attending (77% versus 86%; P = .64; Table 2). Our current sample size may be adequate in future research if success rates diverge as the experience of the procedure service attending increases. Though expert in performing bedside procedures, he had limited experience teaching them, particularly with the use of a hand‐carried ultrasound device. Just as there is a learning curve to gain the experience to successfully perform procedures,13 so may there be a learning curve to successfully teach procedures.14

Future research could address these limitations by more closely observing the decision‐making processes of physicians who order bedside procedures for general medicine inpatients in various settings. Our findings suggest that although patients' clinical circumstances are likely the most important consideration, nonclinical factors may also affect physicians' decisions.12 Like other multifaceted decision‐making processes of physicians,15 the complexity of this decision is important to examine because, as our pilot data suggest, a procedure service may not lead to more successful procedure attempts or reductions in the number of major complications. Although the cumulative expertise of our service or the innovative methods of training of other institutions may improve the performance of bedside procedures,5, 13 physicians' decisions about whether to order them will remain paramount, because any improvement in procedural competence will do little to reduce the relative danger of unnecessary procedures16 or the missed benefit of procedures left undone. Physicians of inpatients17, 18 should refine the indications for and anticipated benefits from these commonly performed invasive procedures.

References
  1. Leape LL,Brennan TA,Laird N, et al.The nature of adverse events in hospitalized patients: Results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study II.N Engl J Med.1991;324:377384.
  2. Thomas EJ,Studdert DM,Newhouse JP, et al.Cost of medical injuries in Utah and Colorado.Inquiry.36;255264.
  3. Wigton RS,Blank LL,Nicolas JA,Tape TG.Procedural Skills Training in Internal Medicine Residencies: A Survey of Program Directors.Ann Intern Med1989;111:93238.
  4. Huang GC,Smith CC,Gordon CE, et al.Beyond the comfort zone: residents assess their comfort performing inpatient medicine procedures.Am J Med.2006;119:71.e17.e24.
  5. Smith CC,Gordon CE,Feller‐Kopman D, et al.Creation of an innovative inpatient medical procedure service and a method to evaluate house staff competency.J Gen Intern Med.2004;19:510513.
  6. Guadagnoli E,Hauptman PJ,Ayanian JZ, et al.Variation in the use of cardiac procedures after acute myocardial infarction.N Engl J Med.1995;333:573578.
  7. Schroeder SA,Marton KI,Strom BL.Frequency and morbidity of inpatient procedures: report of a pilot study from two teaching hospitals.Arch Intern Med.1978;138:18091811.
  8. Verrilli D,Welch HG.The impact of diagnostic testing on therapeutic interventions.JAMA.1996;275:11891191.
  9. Weinberger M,Oddone EZ,Henderson WG, et al.Does increased access to primary care reduce hospital readmissions?N Engl J Med.1996;334:14411447.
  10. Tu JV,Naylor CD,Kumar D, et al.Coronary artery bypass graft surgery in Ontario and New York State: which rate is right?Ann Intern Med.1997;126:1319.
  11. Fisher ES,Welch HG.Avoiding the unintended consequences of growth in medical care. How might more be worse?JAMA.1999;281:446453.
  12. Wennberg JE,Barnes BA,Zubkoff M.Professional uncertainty and the problem of supplier‐induced demand.Soc Sci Med.1982;811824.
  13. Ramakrishna G,Higano ST,McDonald FS,Shultz HJ.A curricular initiative for internal medicine residents to enhance proficiency in internal jugular central venous line placement.Mayo Clin Proc.2005;80:212218.
  14. Wickstrom GC,Kelley DK,Keyserling TC, et al.Confidence of Academic General Internists and Family Physicians to Teach Ambulatory Procedures.J Gen Intern Med.2000;15:353360.
  15. Lucas BP,Evans AT,Reilly BM, et al.The impact of evidence on physicians' inpatient treatment decisions.J Gen Intern Med.2004;19:402409.
  16. Fisher ES.Medical care—is more always better?N Engl J Med.2003;349:16651667.
  17. Aronson MD,Nelson JR.Point/counterpoint: should hospital medicine become a distinct specialty?Hospitalist.2005;9(1):1519.
  18. Pistoria MJ,Amin AN,Dressler DD,McKean SCW,Budnitz TL.The core competencies in hospital medicine: a framework for curriculum development by the Society of Hospital Medicine.J Hospital Med.2006;1:S1S95.
References
  1. Leape LL,Brennan TA,Laird N, et al.The nature of adverse events in hospitalized patients: Results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study II.N Engl J Med.1991;324:377384.
  2. Thomas EJ,Studdert DM,Newhouse JP, et al.Cost of medical injuries in Utah and Colorado.Inquiry.36;255264.
  3. Wigton RS,Blank LL,Nicolas JA,Tape TG.Procedural Skills Training in Internal Medicine Residencies: A Survey of Program Directors.Ann Intern Med1989;111:93238.
  4. Huang GC,Smith CC,Gordon CE, et al.Beyond the comfort zone: residents assess their comfort performing inpatient medicine procedures.Am J Med.2006;119:71.e17.e24.
  5. Smith CC,Gordon CE,Feller‐Kopman D, et al.Creation of an innovative inpatient medical procedure service and a method to evaluate house staff competency.J Gen Intern Med.2004;19:510513.
  6. Guadagnoli E,Hauptman PJ,Ayanian JZ, et al.Variation in the use of cardiac procedures after acute myocardial infarction.N Engl J Med.1995;333:573578.
  7. Schroeder SA,Marton KI,Strom BL.Frequency and morbidity of inpatient procedures: report of a pilot study from two teaching hospitals.Arch Intern Med.1978;138:18091811.
  8. Verrilli D,Welch HG.The impact of diagnostic testing on therapeutic interventions.JAMA.1996;275:11891191.
  9. Weinberger M,Oddone EZ,Henderson WG, et al.Does increased access to primary care reduce hospital readmissions?N Engl J Med.1996;334:14411447.
  10. Tu JV,Naylor CD,Kumar D, et al.Coronary artery bypass graft surgery in Ontario and New York State: which rate is right?Ann Intern Med.1997;126:1319.
  11. Fisher ES,Welch HG.Avoiding the unintended consequences of growth in medical care. How might more be worse?JAMA.1999;281:446453.
  12. Wennberg JE,Barnes BA,Zubkoff M.Professional uncertainty and the problem of supplier‐induced demand.Soc Sci Med.1982;811824.
  13. Ramakrishna G,Higano ST,McDonald FS,Shultz HJ.A curricular initiative for internal medicine residents to enhance proficiency in internal jugular central venous line placement.Mayo Clin Proc.2005;80:212218.
  14. Wickstrom GC,Kelley DK,Keyserling TC, et al.Confidence of Academic General Internists and Family Physicians to Teach Ambulatory Procedures.J Gen Intern Med.2000;15:353360.
  15. Lucas BP,Evans AT,Reilly BM, et al.The impact of evidence on physicians' inpatient treatment decisions.J Gen Intern Med.2004;19:402409.
  16. Fisher ES.Medical care—is more always better?N Engl J Med.2003;349:16651667.
  17. Aronson MD,Nelson JR.Point/counterpoint: should hospital medicine become a distinct specialty?Hospitalist.2005;9(1):1519.
  18. Pistoria MJ,Amin AN,Dressler DD,McKean SCW,Budnitz TL.The core competencies in hospital medicine: a framework for curriculum development by the Society of Hospital Medicine.J Hospital Med.2006;1:S1S95.
Issue
Journal of Hospital Medicine - 2(3)
Issue
Journal of Hospital Medicine - 2(3)
Page Number
143-149
Page Number
143-149
Publications
Publications
Article Type
Display Headline
Impact of a bedside procedure service on general medicine inpatients: A firm‐based trial
Display Headline
Impact of a bedside procedure service on general medicine inpatients: A firm‐based trial
Legacy Keywords
bedside procedures, health services needs and demands, technology (medical), teaching hospitals
Legacy Keywords
bedside procedures, health services needs and demands, technology (medical), teaching hospitals
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