The Role of Prehospital eFAST in Accelerating Time to Diagnostics or Definitive Treatment in the Emergency Department

The Role of Prehospital eFAST in Accelerating Time to Diagnostics or Definitive Treatment in the Emergency Department

Actual literature has demonstrated that prehospital extended focused assessment sonography for trauma (eFAST) could impact on logistic and treatment decisions such as mode of transportation and choice of hospital destination.

However, there are no data with regard to in-hospital effects of a positive prehospital eFAST.

The main objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of prehospital eFAST driven decisions on in hospital time-to-definitive diagnostics or time-to definitive treatment, whichever came first, in a level 1 trauma center.

The goal is to define if this information could have a role in prioritizing patients' access to care in a population of abdominal trauma patients with A-AIS > 1 and a documented liver or spleen injury.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Patients admitted to emergency department with a ICD-9-CM diagnosis of traumatic liver or spleen injury (codes 8640x, 8641x, 8650x, 8651x)
• Abdominal AIS ≥ 2
• CT scan or operating theatre admission performed within 180 minutes from ED admission

Exclusion Criteria:

• Death before CT scan or OR/Angio suite admission (missing primary outcome measure)
• Transferred to other hospitals before CT scan or operating room admission
• Missing data