Feasibility of identifying important changes in care management resulting from cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) using hospital episode data in patients who activate the primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI) pathway

BACKGROUND: We determined whether it is feasible to identify important changes in care management resulting from cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) in patients who activate the primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI) pathway from hospital episode data, in order to construct a composite primary outcome (hypothesised to reduce the risk of major adverse cardiac-related events, MACE) to compare patients exposed to CMR or not. METHODS: We used Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) and Patient Episode Database for Wales (PEDW) to identify clinical events that reflected important changes in management in the year following the index admission in five subgroups of patients who activated the PPCI pathway recruited as part of a feasibility cohort study (n = 1655 with HES/PEDW data). For all subgroups, we identified frequency of events and time to the first event for each change in management. RESULTS: We identified all clinical events (new diagnoses, additional diagnostic tests and procedures) except for medication prescriptions. Diagnostic tests were underestimated because most are carried out in outpatient clinics and outpatient datasets had missing procedure codes for 74% of patients (some tests done in hospital may also not be recorded). We successfully tabulated frequencies of events and distributions of times to first event for most changes in management by CMR status and in CMR / non CMR centres. CONCLUSIONS: It is feasible to identify changes in care management between patients who have / do not have CMR within relevant patient subgroups. Further work to derive a weighting algorithm is required before attempting to combine the events in a composite endpoint. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12874-019-0755-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.