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Five minute consult: Point of care testing

Emergency Management Alert, April 18, 2007

Frank Kaeberlein, M.D., the chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Mercy Medical Center in Canton, OH, spoke to EMA's sister publication HealthLeaders magazine this month about POC testing. Mercy, with 32 staffed beds, recently implemented the bedside technology to cut down on the paper trail of lab tests and to speed care for those in immediate need of cardiac attention. Kaeberlein says POC has done all that was expected of it and more, improving turnaround time, length of stay, and walk-out rates. His remarks:

The key to point of care testing is that it is performed within the ED.  You can do it either at the bedside or elsewhere in the department. We use the standard test that helps detect very minor injuries early on by revealing increases in cardiac markers in the blood. Running the test at the bedside eliminates wasted time spent transporting blood samples from the ED to the main lab.

With the point-of-care testing machine, there are no operator-dependent steps that need to be taken. The machine does everything inside of itself and will not print out a result unless it reads it as accurate. The difference with point-of-care testing is that once patients come in with chest pain or equivalent complaints, they're immediately brought back from the triage area by a nurse who has the authority to run the test. So it's simply nurse to patient to machine. We have a total turnaround time from arrival to result of 30 minutes or less, as opposed to before when it took more than an hour.

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