Startling benefit of cardiology meetings

Lower mortality rates found among heart patients admitted to hospitals during national scientific meetings

VIDEO:High-risk patients with certain acute heart conditions are more likely to survive than other similar patients if they are admitted to the hospital during national cardiology meetings, when many cardiologists... view more

High-risk patients with certain acute heart conditions are more likely to survive than other similar patients if they are admitted to the hospital during national cardiology meetings, when many cardiologists are away from their regular practices.

Sixty percent of patients with cardiac arrest who were admitted to a teaching hospital during the days when cardiologists were at scientific meetings died within 30 days, compared to 70 percent of patients who were admitted on non-meeting days.

"That's a tremendous reduction in mortality, better than most of the medical interventions that exist to treat these conditions," said study senior author Anupam Jena, assistant professor of health care policy at HMS, internist at Massachusetts General Hospital and faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. There is substantial ambiguity in how medical care is practiced, particularly for these complex patients, he said. "This study may help illuminate some of those gray areas and suggest ways we can provide better care for those high-risk patients."

The results of the study are published today in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Along with collaborators at the National Institutes of Health, the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and the RAND Corporation, Jena compared similar populations of patients treated at teaching and nonteaching hospitals during American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology meetings and on matched dates immediately surrounding those meetings. They looked at survival rates of high-risk and low-risk patients with heart failure, heart attack and cardiac arrest.

While survival rates at teaching hospitals went up during meetings for high-risk heart failure and for cardiac arrest, there was no difference in mortality between meeting and non-meeting dates for patients with high-risk heart attack or for low-risk patients with any of the conditions studied. There was also no change in mortality rates for any patients for any of the conditions in nonteaching hospitals.

"We don't have the full set of answers about what works best in these cases, but the evidence suggests that a less is more approach might be best for higher-risk patients with these conditions," Jena said.

The researchers found that certain intensive procedures were performed less often on the high-risk patients in the study during meeting dates than outside meeting dates.

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Startling benefit of cardiology meetings