diagnostic agreement of original and faxed copies of electrocardiograms

ABSTRACT

General practitioners working in remote and rural areas sometimes need consultation with cardiologists. One practical and cost-effective way is transmission of patients' electrocardiographic images via ordinary fax machine to the cardiologists, but there is an important question that how much agreement exists between the diagnoses made by reading an original electrocardiogram and its copy transmitted via fax. In this cross-sectional study, 60 original electrocardiographic images were given to cardiologists for diagnosis. In the next step those electrocardiographic images were faxed to the hospital through a simple cheap fax machine, one month later the same cardiologist was asked to put his diagnosis on the copied versions of electrocardiographs, and the results were compared. In 59 studied cases, the two method of diagnoses were exactly the same and only in one case the diagnoses were different. Therefore, Kappa agreement coefficient was calculated as 96%. According to the results of this study, general practitioners working in deprived areas can be certainly recommended to send patients' electrocardiographic images to the cardiologists via fax in the case of needing consultation