Does point of care troponin testing speed up care of cardiac patients in emergency?

A randomized controlled trial of point of care troponin estimation vs in-lab methods to reduce length of stay in Emergency Department cardiac patients.

Status

Completed

Phases

Phase 3

Study type

Interventional

Source

ANZCTR

Registry ID

ACTRN12607000475448

Enrollment

300

Registered

2007-09-21

Start date

2007-11-05

Completion date

Unknown

Last updated

2020-01-13

For informational purposes only — not medical advice. Sourced from public registries and may not reflect the latest updates. Terms

Conditions

None listed

Brief summary

A randomized comparison of two types of troponin testing for ED patients.Currently ED patients with possible coronary syndromes wait significant times to be "cleared " or declared low enough risk for stress testing or discharge. One component of this wait is the time for troponin results to become available which may be reduced by using bedside or point of care(POC) tests.This could result in acute ED bed space being more efficiently utilized.Many other factors however may affect the speed of patient flow and a controlled trial will help to quantify this.

Interventions

Point of care troponin testing will be made available on some weeks.On other weeks the point of care troponin machine will be unavailable.The availability of the machine represents the intervention and the weeks that it is available will determined by computer generated randomization prior to the study and then concealed until the monday morning at the beginning of each week.At that time after opening that weeks allocation the machine will either be made available for use( which may save time for patients or not) or withdrawn for one week. If the machine is withdrawn for that week the clinical staff will be forced to use usual (laboratory bench-top methods) of testing troponin.The expected duration of the trial is 3 months assuming adequate numbers to power the study (150 in each arm)are recruited.

Study design

Allocation

Randomised controlled trial

Intervention model

Parallel

Primary purpose

Diagnosis

Masking

Open (masking not used)

Eligibility

Sex/Gender

All

Age

25 Years to -2147483648 No limit

Healthy volunteers

Inclusion criteria

All patients presenting to emergency with possible acute coronary syndrome

Exclusion criteria

1.patients with acute elevation of the ess to tee segment of their electrocardiogram 2.patients arriving with known elevated troponin.

Outcome results