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The ease and accuracy of chest computed tomography (CT) for evaluating pulmonary embolism (PE) have led to a dramatic increase in its use. To evaluate whether implementation of a Wells criteria–based decision support tool at a community hospital emergency department affected the CT positive yield rate for PE, researchers compared rates between a retrospective preintervention cohort of 205 patients with suspected PE and a prospective postintervention cohort of 404 patients.
After implementation, the positive yield rate increased by 8.4%. CT scans were ordered for 15 patients despite negative d-dimer results and low Wells scores; all these scans were negative. CT scans were not ordered for 44 patients who had high pretest probability; 1 patien…