Diagnosis and Treatment of ACS in the ED: The Impact of Rapid Bedside cTnI Testing on Outcomes

Cardiac troponin I is routinely used in the emergency department as a risk stratification tool for detecting myocardial necrosis in patients with possible acute coronary syndrome. It is our hypothesis that having bedside, point-of-care testing for TnI in the ED will decrease time needed to disposition patients to home from the ED or send to the cardiac catheterization laboratory or intensive care setting. Similarly, having point-of-care testing in the ED should decrease the time required to deliver anti-platelet drugs such as aspirin and glycoprotein IIb/IIIa inhibitors and anti-thrombin agents such as heparin to high risk patients found to have a positive TnI test. This will be evaluated in a randomized, controlled clinical trial of 2000 patients. Half will have the test performed in the ED at the bedside (point-of-care) while the other half will receive the usual lab results obtained from the central lab (typically requiring 1.5-2 hours to return).