MP023: Reasons for referral and hospitalization among emergency department patients with syncope

Abstract

Introduction: Syncope can be caused by serious life-threatening conditions not obvious during the initial ED assessment leading to wide variations in management. We aimed to identify the reasons for consultations and hospitalizations, outcomes, and the potential cost savings if an outpatient cardiac monitoring strategy were developed. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of adult syncope patients at 5 academic EDs over 41 months. We collected baseline characteristics, reasons for consultation and hospitalization, hospital length of stay and average total inpatient cost. Adjudicated 30-day serious adverse events (SAEs) included death, myocardial infarction, arrhythmia, structural heart disease, pulmonary embolism, significant hemorrhage and procedural intervention. We used descriptive statistics with 95% CI. Results: Of the 4,064 patients enrolled (mean age 53.1 years, 55.9% female), 3,255 (80.1%) were discharged from the ED, 209 (5.2%) had a SAE identified in the ED, 600 (14.8%) with no SAE were referred for consultation in the ED and 299 (7.4%) were hospitalized: 55.5% of referrals and 55.2% of hospitalizations were for suspected cardiac syncope (46.5% admitted for cardiac monitoring of whom 71.2% had no cause identified). SAE among groups were 9.7% in total; 2.5% discharged by ED physician; 3.4% discharged by consultant from ED; 21.7% as inpatient and 4.8% following discharge from hospital. The mean hospital length of stay for cardiac syncope was 6.7 (95%CI 5.8, 7.7) days with total estimated costs of $7,925 per patient (95% CI: 7434, 8417). Conclusion: Suspected cardiac syncope, particularly arrhythmia, was the major reason for ED referral and hospitalization. The majority of patients hospitalized for cardiac monitoring had no identified cause. An important number of patients suffered SAE, particularly arrhythmias outside the hospital. These findings highlight the need to develop a robust syncope prediction tool and a remote cardiac monitoring strategy to improve patient safety while saving substantial health care resources.