USE CASE: Strategies to Measure and Reduce Cardiac Testing
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Request Summary: The researchers proposed to use the CO APCD data to measure how often certain cardiac stress tests that provide no benefit to patients, and can sometimes lead to patient harm, are occurring in Colorado. By determining why these cardiac stress tests are performed in poor-performing hospitals and identifying the best practices that minimize their use in top-performing hospitals, researchers hoped to discover the most effective ways of reducing use of the tests in Colorado.
Benefit to Colorado: Identifying effective measures to reduce use of these tests could be applied statewide to improve patient outcomes and reduce health care expenditures.