Chest pain patients were discharged 26 minutes quicker when doctors received final troponin lab results via push notification to their smartphones.
Delivering lab results to ED physicians via their smartphones can help discharge patients from the emergency department faster, data shows.
The study, published online inAnnals of Emergency Medicine, found that chest pain patients in the ED whose attending emergency physicians received lab results delivered directly to their smartphones spent about 26 minutes less waiting to be discharged than patients whose lab results were delivered to the electronic patient record on the hospital computer system.
"For many patients, waiting for lab results that determine if they stay in the hospital or go home is the hardest part of the ER visit," study author Aikta Verma, MD, MHSc, of the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, said in a statement.
"Physicians who received troponin results on their smartphones made the decision to discharge their patients with chest pain a median of 26 minutes faster than physicians without troponin push-alert notifications."
Patients who come to the ED with chest pain have blood drawn to test for troponin levels, which, if elevated, indicate a heart attack. Physicians participating in the study were randomized to either receive push alerts directly on their smartphones about their patients' troponin lab tests or not receive them.
The authors wrote that they "retrospectively identified patients treated by participating physicians during the study period who were discharged from the ED with chest pain."
The researchers measured the time from the final troponin result to the discharge decision, as well as the total length of stay.
The researchers found that the overall median interval from final troponin results to discharge decision was 79.7 minutes. For the 554 patients in the intervention group (smartphone) it was 68.5 minutes. For the 551 patients in the control group (no smartphone), it was 94.3 minutes.
According to the researchers, the 25.8-minute difference is "statistically significant." The total emergency department length of stay was 345 minute in the control group and 328 minutes in the intervention group, which researchers did not consider statistically significant.
"For patients waiting for lab results, 26 minutes is significant, even if the smartphone process did not shorten overall length of stay significantly," said Verma.
The authors added that many other results could also be pushed to physicians' smartphones, such as other critical lab results, radiology reports, and vital signs.
"For now, we recommend the use of the push-alert notification system to improve flow through the emergency department for chest pain patients," Verma said.
Alexandra Wilson Pecci is an editor for HealthLeaders.
