Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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To delineate components of delay within the hospital ED for patients presenting with symptoms of stroke. ⋯ These data suggest that arriving by EMS is associated with shorter times to being seen by an EP and receiving a CT scan. The influence of EMS on delays associated with rapid medical care of stroke patients reaches beyond the out-of-hospital transport phase.
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Comparative Study
Retrospective review of emergency department patients with non-variceal upper gastrointestinal hemorrhage for potential outpatient management.
To determine the number of ED patients with non-variceal upper gastrointestinal hemorrhage (NVUGIH) who could have been managed as outpatients through application of previously developed clinical guidelines. ⋯ In a non-HMO urban teaching hospital, 18 patients with NVUGIH met criteria for outpatient management in a six-month period and none developed a complication during a mean in-hospital stay of 2.1 days.
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Survival analysis is a group of statistical methods used to analyze data representing the time to an event of interest, e.g., the duration of survival after an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest or the length of time a patient stays in the ED. Survival analysis properly accounts for patients who are lost to follow-up and for patients who have not yet experienced the event of interest at the end of the study's observation period (censored data). This article acquaints the reader with the terminology, methodology, and limitations of survival analysis. Specific methods discussed include life tables, the Kaplan-Meier product limit estimate, the log-rank test, and the multivariate Cox proportional hazards model.