Cardiology Boards: Echo Coding Sheet

[bulldog]

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Can those who have taken cardiology boards and passed common on how to code on echo boards? I get the sense that the lady on Mayo DVD's over-codes. i.e. she'd show a single image in m-mode, and make comment of degree os stenosis, ejection fraction, wall thickness, etc.

1. If a patient has a calcified Aortic valve, and you know is severe AS and you are shown only plax along w/ gradients, would you code 1) severe AS 2) calcified AV 3) wall motion 4) lv size 5) lv thickness?

2. If you encountered a congenital case like Tetralogy of Fallot with plax showing overriding aorta, gap in septum, the main codes would be 1) ToF 2) VSD. Would you comment on LV size, thickness, RV size, LV wall motion?

3. I'm usd to chamber quantification w/ indexed area to comment on atrial size. Would you typically comment on atrial size if you see one view of apical 2 chamber or possibly an apical 4 chamber?

Any good summary sheets out there? Thanks.

 

[dragonfly99]

I think "overcoding" is the way to go. Speaking from personal experience, the echocardiogram images were easy and I pretty much new what they all were, but when I got my score back, I did <average by a little but on the echo reading portion of the boards. The only reason I could think of (unless I'm a lot dumber than I think I am) was that I didn't check enough of the little boxes, partly b/c I didn't review the coding sheet much at all beforehand. My impression was if you have some congenital problem or specific other dz, you need to code for that plus any other significant abnormalities that you see.

In general the echo reading part is not hard, though, and even though I didn't "like" my score on that part it was far from a failing score. It was just kind of annoying to see that my score was kind of low even though I was sure I "knew" what the images were.

 

[bulldog]

any other thoughts from other posters? code lv size, thickness, wall motion, rv wall motion for every echo even if it isn't main finding?