The greatest challenge of today’s medicine and health care is the need to reduce health care costs without reducing the quality of treatment (1). This type of challenge requires an innovative approach to reducing health care costs, and one of these approaches is performing invasive cardiologic diagnostic procedures, such as coronarography, in the daily hospital.
Although invasive procedures, such as coronarography, are traditionally done during hospitalization, they are nowadays performed more often in the daily hospital. Since the 1980s, coronarography has been performed in the daily hospital worldwide. During the 1980s and 1990s, much research was done about the safety and cost-effectiveness of this approach. By comparing multiple studies about the safety of this kind of approach in more than 105000 patients, the rate of complications obtained between 1 and 2%. The rate of patient hospitalization was between 0.5 and 2.3%. The study from 1988 showed cost savings of 885 dollars per patient, which would in today’s time be the equivalent of 2138 dollars or 16550 Croatian Kuna (inflation adjusted). Newer studies are rare because the safety and efficiency of performing coronarography in daily hospitals have been proven since the 1980s.
Performing coronarography in the daily hospital is a sustainable concept of providing health care that gives modern, high-quality health care at a lower cost without jeopardizing patient safety.