Reducing Inappropriate Stat Echocardiograms: A Quality Improvement Initiative (RISE-QI)

Background

A complete transthoracic echocardiogram takes approximately 45 minutes to complete, including time for image acquisition and preliminary reporting by the sonographer. The process can take substantially longer if there are technical difficulties or if contrast must be administered due to suboptimal imaging windows. This can create a considerable echocardiogram backlog at high-volume institutions. At the authors’ institution, there was a concern that ordering providers were inappropriately designating studies as stat to get their patients to the front of the bottleneck. On review, the quality improvement team found that 19.9% of all echocardiograms ordered during June 2021 were designated stat, of which 44.0% contained indications that the team determined were rarely appropriate for a stat priority designation.

Methods

The team located a flaw in the electronic health record interface that encouraged overuse of the stat designation, so an interface change was designed and implemented to create a hard stop requiring the selection of predetermined indications for any stat order. We also reduced the number of steps required to select the less-urgent ASAP priority to encourage its use over stat priority.

Results

Within one month postintervention, there was a statistically significant 36.3% reduction in the order of stat echocardiograms, with a concurrent 173.9% rise in ASAP orders over the same time frame. These numbers remained steady at one-year and two-year follow-up analyses.

Conclusion

A quick and simple modification to the echocardiogram order user interface can lead to a considerable reduction in the number of stat orders.