Nurse Practitioners (and Other Physician Extenders) Are Not an Appropriate Replacement for Expert Physician Electrocardiogram Readers in Routine Clinical Practice

A recent study (4) assessing the competency of graduating physician assistants in ECG interpretation showed 50.7% accuracy on the 22-item ECG examination (including 68% accuracy on the 6 critical ECG subsets); this is in general similar to the level of competence of graduating medical students and internal medicine interns but lower than that of graduating internal medicine residents (5).