Patient Follow Up
Our lab is going to start following patients after discharge to home. The plan is to call patients at home and ask them various questions about their post-hospital recovery period. We™d like to know what other labs do in regards to:
Follow up time-frame;
How they document these interviews;
What questions are asked during the interview;
Where is the data stored;
Who is responsible for accomplishing this (i.e. cath lab nurses/techs, clinic staff, same day admissions);
What is your staffing ratio;
How is time allotted to complete this task
(daily vs. weekly, hours per day/week ).
Any input is greatly appreciated and we look forward to hearing your ideas.

The Rush Cath Lab, Rush Presbyterian St. Luke™s Medical Center, Chicago, Il.
Email: jacquern1@yahoo.com
Cc: CathLabDigest@aol.com

Interventions Open Heart Backup
We noticed that the lab featured in the January 2003 Cath Lab Digest (Governor Juan F. Luis Hospital & Medical Center, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands) does interventions without open heart backup. This brought up two questions:

1. How many cath labs are there in the U.S.?

2. How many of these labs do intervention without OR backup?

We are hearing more and more labs starting without open heart backup, so we are curious as to what the ratio is now.

Michael Wellner and staff, Holy Family Memorial Medical Center, Manitowoc, WI
Email: MWellner@HFMHealth.org
Cc: CathLabDigest@aol.com

Editor™s Note: A quick search of the internet regarding the question asked by Michael Wellner, above, re: How many cath labs are there in the U.S.? revealed the following possible answers:

1.General Publications of the Society for Cardiac Angiography & Interventions (SCA&I)

Directory of Cardiac Cath Labs in the United States: This directory lists over 2,000 cath labs in the United States with services that they offer. The fifth edition was published in 1999.

From the website of the Society for Cardiac Angiography & Interventions (SCA&I): www.scai.org/public/pages/index.cfm?pageid=287

2.IMV™s Cardiac Cath Lab Census Shows Cath Lab Cases Increasing by 14% From 1998 To 2000

IMV™s fifth Cardiac Cath Lab Census Database surveys 80% or more of all U.S. cardiac cath labs. Completed in 2001, the study reveals cardiac and non-cardiac cases performed in cath labs increased 14% from 1998 to 2000 to 3.75 million cases annually. For the purpose of this study a case is defined as a visit to the cath lab by a patient on a given day. Of the 3.75 million cases, 3.4 million were cardiac-related and .35 million were not. The non-cardiac cases were primarily carotid, iliac, renal, aortic, femoral and extremity cases.
The Cardiac Cath Lab Census Database identifies 1,931 sites with cath labs and surveys over 1,550 of these facilities.

From the website of IMV Medical Information Division, Inc. (formerly Technology Marketing Group) a marketing research and consulting firm: www.imvlimited.com