Annals of emergency medicine
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Treatment with buprenorphine significantly reduces both all-cause and overdose mortality among individuals with opioid use disorder. Offering buprenorphine treatment to individuals who experience a nonfatal opioid overdose represents an opportunity to reduce opioid overdose fatalities. ⋯ Emergency medical services (EMS) professionals can help address this treatment gap. In this Concepts article, we describe the federal legal landscape that governs the ability of EMS professionals to administer buprenorphine treatment, and discuss state and local regulatory considerations relevant to this promising and emerging practice.
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Studies of early data found that US emergency departments (EDs) were characterized by prolonged patient waiting, long visit times, frequent and prolonged boarding (ie, patients kept waiting in ED hallways or other space outside the ED on admission to the hospital), and patients leaving without receiving or completing treatment. We sought to assess recent trends in ED throughput nationally. ⋯ Overall, there was improvement in ED timeliness from 2006 to 2016. However, we observed a decrease in the proportion of the sickest patients discharged within 8 hours of arrival, although this may be due to increased ancillary testing or specially consultation over time.
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Multicenter Study Observational Study
Predicting Ambulance Patient Wait Times: A Multicenter Derivation and Validation Study.
To derive and internally and externally validate machine-learning models to predict emergency ambulance patient door-to-off-stretcher wait times that are applicable to a wide variety of emergency departments. ⋯ Electronic emergency demographic and flow information can be used to estimate emergency ambulance patient off-stretcher times. Models can be built with reasonable accuracy for multiple hospitals using a small number of point-of-care variables.