Overuse of Preoperative Cardiac Stress Testing in Medicare Patients Undergoing Elective Noncardiac Surgery

Abstract

In a 5% sample of Medicare claims data, 2803 patients underwent preoperative stress testing without any indications. When these results were applied to the entire Medicare population, we estimated that there are over 56,000 patients who underwent unnecessary preoperative stress testing. The rate of testing in patients without cardiac indications has increased significantly over time.