ECG Interpretation Proficiency of Healthcare Professionals

ECG interpretation is essential in modern medicine, yet achieving and maintaining competency can be challenging for healthcare professionals. Quan-tifying proficiency gaps can inform educational inter-ventions for addressing these challenges. Medical professionals from diverse disciplines and training levels interpreted 30 12-lead ECGs with common urgent and nonurgent findings. Average accuracy (percentage of correctly identified findings), interpretation time per ECG, and self-reported confidence (rated on a scale of 0 [not confident], 1 [somewhat confident], or 2 [confident]) were evaluated. Among the 1206 partici-pants, there were 72 (6%) primary care physicians (PCPs), 146 (12%) cardiology fellows-in-training (FITs), 353 (29%) resident physicians, 182 (15%) med-ical students, 84 (7%) advanced practice providers (APPs), 120 (10%) nurses, and 249 (21%) allied health professionals (AHPs). Overall, participants achieved an average overall accuracy of 56.4% & PLUSMN; 17.2%, inter-pretation time of 142 & PLUSMN; 67 seconds, and confidence of 0.83 & PLUSMN; 0.53. Cardiology FITs demonstrated superior performance across all metrics. PCPs had a higher accuracy compared to nurses and APPs (58.1% vs 46.8% and 50.6%; P < 0.01), but a lower accuracy than resident physicians (58.1% vs 59.7%; P < 0.01). AHPs outperformed nurses and APPs in every metric and showed comparable performance to resident physicians and PCPs. Our findings highlight signifi-cant gaps in the ECG interpretation proficiency among healthcare professionals. (Curr Probl Cardiol 2023;48:101924.)