Emergency patients in the U.S. receive almost twice as many CT scans as patients in Ontario, Canada, according to a study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, MedCity News reported.
In the study, researchers analyzed 699 million U.S. emergency department medical records and 26 million from Ontario from 2003 to 2008. They found that one out of every nine U.S. emergency patients received a CT scan, compared with one out of 17 Ontario emergency patients.
Whatever the reasons for the differences between the U.S. and Ontario, when it comes to CT utilization in emergency departments, "in both places, they're doing too many studies," commented Howard Forman, a health economist at Yale University and practicing emergency/trauma radiologist who was not involved in the study. Article