• Danielle E Altman, Benjamin C Sun, Bryan Lin, Aileen Baecker, Margaret Samuels-Kalow, Stacy Park, Ernest Shen, Yi-Lin Wu, and Adam Sharp.
• From, Kaiser Permanente Southern California, Pasadena, CA.
• Acad Emerg Med. 2020 Jun 1; 27 (6): 487491487-491.

ObjectivesThe objective was to evaluate if there is an association between patient-physician language concordance and adverse patient outcomes or physician adherence to clinical recommendations for emergency department (ED) patients with chest pain.MethodsWe conducted a retrospective observational study of adult ED chest pain encounters with a troponin order from May 2016 to September 2017 across 15 community EDs. Outcomes were 30-day acute myocardial infarction or all-cause mortality, hospital admission/observation, or noninvasive cardiac testing. To assess patient outcomes, we used the overall cohort. To assess adherence to clinical recommendations, we used a subgroup of patients with a low-risk HEART score. A mixed-effects logistic regression model was used to compare the odds of the outcomes between language concordant and discordant patient-physician pairs, controlling for patient characteristics.ResultsOverall, 52,014 ED encounters were included (10,791 low-risk HEART encounters). Of those 6,452 (12.4%) encounters were language discordant and 1.7% in each group had an adverse outcome. Adjusted models demonstrated no increased risk for language discordant ED encounters when comparing adverse outcomes (odds ratio [OR] = 0.96, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.6 to 1.5) for all patients or recommended care (OR = 1.02, 95% CI = 0.87 to 1.2) for low-risk patients.ConclusionsNo associations were found between patient-physician language concordance and outcomes or physician adherence to clinical recommendations for ED patients with chest pain. Accessible and effective interpretation services, combined with a decision support tool with standard clinical recommendations, may have contributed to equitable care.© 2020 by the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine.

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