Differences between patients in whom physicians agree versus disagree about the preoperative diagnosis of heart failure

Study objective: To quantify preoperative heart failure (HF) diagnostic agreement and identify characteristics of patients in whom physicians agreed versus disagreed about the diagnosis. Design: Observational cohort study. Setting: Patients undergoing major non-cardiac surgery at an academic center between 2015 and 2019. Patients: 40,659 patients undergoing major non-cardiac surgery, among which a stratified subsample of 1018 patients with and without documented HF was reviewed. Interventions: Via a panel of physicians frequently managing patients with HF (cardiologists, cardiac anesthesi-ologists, intensivists), detailed chart reviews were performed (two per patient; median review time 32 min per reviewer per patient) to render adjudicated HF diagnoses. Measurements: Adjudicated diagnostic agreement measures (percent agreement, Krippendorf's alpha) and uni-variate comparisons (standardized differences) between patients in whom physicians agreed versus disagreed about the preoperative HF diagnosis. Main results: Among patients with documented HF, physicians agreed about the diagnosis in 80.0% of cases (consensus positive), disagreed in 13.8% (disagreement), and refuted the diagnosis in 6.3% (consensus negative). Conversely, among patients without documented HF, physicians agreed about the diagnosis in 88.0% (consensus negative), disagreed in 8.4% (disagreement), and refuted the diagnosis in 3.6% (consensus positive). The esti-mated agreement for the 40,659 cases was 91.1% (95% CI 88.3%-93.9%); Krippendorff's alpha was 0.77 (0.75-0.80). Compared to patients in whom physicians agreed about a HF diagnosis, patients in whom physicians disagreed exhibited fewer guideline-defined HF diagnostic criteria. Conclusions: Physicians usually agree about HF diagnoses adjudicated via chart review, although disagreement is not uncommon and may be partly explained by heterogeneous clinical presentations. Our findings inform pre-operative screening processes by identifying patients whose characteristics contribute to physician disagreement via chart review.

Automated summary

This study aimed to quantify the diagnostic agreement of preoperative heart failure (HF) and identify characteristics of patients in whom physicians agreed versus disagreed about the diagnosis. Through detailed chart reviews of 1018 patients with and without documented HF, it was found that physicians generally agreed on the HF diagnosis, but there were cases of disagreement. Patients in whom physicians disagreed exhibited fewer guideline-defined HF diagnostic criteria compared to those in whom physicians agreed.