Ambulance Troponin Testing Cuts ED Visits for Chest Pain: Study

Implementing a point-of-care high-sensitivity troponin test alongside the HEART score enabled ambulance crews to safely triage more than a third of patients without hospital transport. Ambulance crews using a high-sensitivity point-of-care troponin test in combination with clinical risk scoring safely avoided emergency department presentations for over a third of patients with acute chest pain, according to study findings presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress. At present, approximately 95% of patients experiencing chest pain are transported by ambulance to emergency departments for diagnostic workups, although only a minority have a serious cardiac condition. Standard practice typically requires blood samples to be analyzed on central laboratory analyzers once patients arrive at the hospital. However, newer high-sensitivity point-of-care troponin tests, such as the assay developed by QuidelOrtho that was evaluated in the study, deliver on-the-spot results in less than 20 minutes with diagnostic accuracy comparable to central laboratory testing.