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A new study finds that more often than not, doctors fail to order critical stress tests before performing heart surgery on Medicare patients.
Researchers state that if doctors did perform the necessary pre-surgical tests, then many surgeries to unblock arteries could be prevented.
The surgery in question is known as PCI or percutaneous coronary intervention, and involves the surgeon putting a catheter into arteries to unclog them.
One drawback to the procedure is the accompanying price tag, a fact that is being blamed for the increased Medicare spending.
for each procedure it costs between 10 and 15 thousand, money that could be saved if the procedures were not necessary.
“It’s important to document that patients are receiving PCI for appropriate indications to ensure the optimal use of Medicare resources,” said Dr. Grace Lin of the University of California, San Francisco, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
It is estimated that each year in the US, more than 800,000 PCI procedures are performed.
