Project Details
About the Project
Dr. Markus Sikkel, Dr. Ojas Mehta, and their Cardiology and technician colleagues found themselves in the not-uncommon situation where members of a medical team develop a hunch to explain variation in the performance of different types of medical equipment. In their case, this was an Implantable Loop Recorder (ILR) which is used to detect occult cardiac arrhythmias in a variety of clinical situations, such as subclinical atrial fibrillation following a stroke. When these devices have erroneous alerts, it causes unnecessary anxiety among patients and extra unnecessary workload on pacemaker/device technicians who have to evaluate these alerts. The team felt there was a higher proportion of these false positives with a brand of ILR called ConfirmRx than with the competing Medtronic Reveal LINQ device.
To explore this hypothesis, the team worked with Island Medical Program student Lyndon Robello to collect and analyse data on the rate of false positives between these two devices. Their results confirmed their initial hunch, that the rate of false positives were significantly higher (14.3 times) for the ConfirmRx device than the alternative. Furthermore, they found that the majority of ConfirmRx patients (60.5 %) had at least 1 false positive atrial fibrillation transmission. These results have informed the team’s decision to reduce their use of these devices, given the increased downstream work those false positives create for the pacemaker clinic.
The group has shared their findings with Cardiac Services BC, presented their findings at the CHRS conference in September 2023, and plan to publish their data. All felt this project would not have gotten off the ground without the funding, as it formalized and focused the energy for this undertaking.