Advocate Trinity Hospital Cardiology Unit Puts Patients On The Fast Track

Advocate Trinity Hospital has created a Fast Track Cardiology Clinic. PHOTO SOURCE-ADOBE STOCK.
Advocate Trinity Hospital has created a Fast Track Cardiology Clinic. PHOTO SOURCE-ADOBE STOCK.

 Advocate Trinity Hospital Cardiology Unit Puts Patients On The Fast Track

By Tia Carol Jones

Advocate Trinity Hospital has created a clinic that enables patients with heart-related issues direct care from a cardiologist. The Fast Track Cardiology Clinic makes it so a patient experiencing a low-risk cardiac episode doesn’t have to wait in the emergency room for a bed to be available in the hospital.

Dr. Marlon Everett, Cardiologist at Advocate Trinity Hospital, said the clinic was launched in 2022. Everett said it was launched because the staff realized a lot of the patients that come to the hospital could be better served being treated outside of the hospital instead of within the hospital. He said a lot of patients use the emergency room as their primary care, once into the hospital it is recognized that they could have been treated on an outpatient basis.

“That’s better comfort for the patient, it reduces resources for the hospital, so it keeps resources available for us to treat much more sick patients than much less sick patients,” Everett said.

With the Fast Track Cardiology Clinic, patients who come into the emergency room who are experiencing chest discomfort, once it is determined it is not a heart attack based on a set of criteria and they are low to moderate risk, those patients are sent home and receive a follow up with a health care provider within 24-48 hours. Those patients are re-evaluated by a healthcare provider, they might be able to get testing done that day. After the testing is evaluated, a cardiologist can review the test to see whether the patient needs more testing or if they should follow up with their primary care provider.

Everett said the goal is to get low to moderate risk cardiac patients out of the emergency room and sleeping in their own bed at night, and to also do a follow up with a healthcare provider the next morning. He said it is better for the patients and allows the patients to come back into a less chaotic situation. It can give patients peace of mind. It expedites the diagnosis and treatment for the patients. He said the clinic has reduced the hospital’s inappropriate admission rates by 25%.

“I think this is kind of novel and it’s actually the wave of the future, because everybody does not need to be admitted to be diagnosed,” Everett said.

Dr. Michael Anderon, Emergency Room Director at Advocate Trinity Hospital, said the clinic has been very successful in moving a lot of the chest pain work from the hospital setting to the outpatient setting. Before the clinic, the emergency room was using a scoring tool called HEART, used by emergency medicine to find out how much patients are at risk of having a major cardiac event in 30 days.

“What the Fast Track Cardiology Clinic has allowed us to do is know we have a resource to send patients to in the next three days, sometimes two … to follow up and all that workup is packaged in one place,” Anderson said. “It’s been a big win.”

For more information about Advocate Trinity Hospital, visit advocatehealth.com/trin/.

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