The American journal of emergency medicine
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A computer program (the Audit Assistant) was developed to help physicians review the care of critically ill emergency department (ED) patients. The program is an example of a new class of decision aids that serves to remind physicians to consider possibilities, not an artificial intelligence program that actually attempts to simulate clinical reasoning. The goal of such programs is to enable physicians to reduce errors--in this case to enable reviewers to notice more of the errors in care in the cases they are reviewing. ⋯ All reviewers preferred the Audit Assistant-suggested list to the critical action list generated by a previous reviewer not using the Audit Assistant (P < .02). Use of the Audit Assistant improved the completeness and the consistency of physician review of mock charts of critically ill ED patients in a small series of cases. The critical actions added for review were important, as demonstrated by the preferential addition of critical actions chosen by other reviewers who were not using the computer program.
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Letter Case Reports
An unusual cause of small bowel obstruction: strangulated obturator hernia.