Even the radiologists are admitting that fact. And they stand to financially benefit most from the cardiac imaging boom.
A study shows that almost 20 percent of patients who had the test over the past 7 months did not need it. Why then, did they receive it? It’s the convenience factor, since “cardiac CT is a painless, noninvasive test that’s really easy for a physician to order.”
I wrote last week about how these scans aren’t ready for prime time. With that in mind, it’s inexcusable that “two-thirds of the inappropriate studies involved an asymptomatic patient with a low pretest probability of coronary heart disease.”
