Saving time saves lives! A time focused evaluation of a single-view echocardiographic screening protocol for subclinical rheumatic heart disease

BACKGROUND: Rheumatic heart disease affects 33 million people in low and middle income countries and is the leading cause of cardiovascular death among children and young adults. Evidence increasingly supports that simplified screening protocols can identify at risk children with good accuracy. One of the more proximal and pragmatic hurdles that has not been completely explored is the time required for executing the screening exam. METHODS: We conducted an observational study comparing three different echocardiographic strategies in four separate school-based screening programs in Kenya and Cameroon. RESULTS: In a sample of 911 children, we found that a single-view screening strategy can be obtained in an average time of 1.2 min/child, the two-view in an average of 2.1 min/child, and multi-view in an average of 5 min/child. CONCLUSIONS: Our study demonstrates that there are significant differences in the time required to execute different screening protocols and is an essential consideration in the feasibility of large scale populations based rheumatic heart disease screening programs.