Kaiser Able To Step Up AAA Screenings

About 10,000 Americans die every year when their aortas burst, the result of a medical condition known as an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Few aortas with bulging walls are diagnosed prior to an aneurysm.

Diagnosis can occur with the use of a simple ultrasound procedure. A bulging aorta can be corrected with surgery, and while the procedure is complex, rates of survival are far higher than those who undergo repair after their aortas burst – the mortality rate in the latter instance is more than 50%.

Kaiser Permanente's Southern California division was able to dramatically reduce the number of unscreened males with the condition by poring over their electronic health records and finding telltale signs of elevated risks. Following the U.S. Preventative  Task Force and American Heart Association guidelines, Kaiser clinicians specifically focused on men ages 65 to 75 with a history of smoking. Altogether, more than 68,000 males met this criteria. Between March 2012 and June of last year, Kaiser was able to reduce unscreened patients at risk from nearly 52% to just over 20%.

“Because abdominal aortic aneurysms are generally asymptomatic before they burst, most of the patients who have a rupture didn’t even know that they had an aneurysm,” said Robert J. Hye, M.D., chief of vascular surgery at Kaiser's San Diego Medical Center.  “That makes screening for AAA all the more vital and important.”

Hye was lead author of a study on the screening process, which was published in the most recent edition of the Journal of Vascular Surgery.