Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is the rubric for an approach to learning and practicing medicine that applies skills from clinical epidemiology, library science, and information management to clinical practice. Teaching EBM effectively requires a longitudinal approach throughout medical education. This presents many opportunities for academic emergency physicians, especially in the setting of an emergency medicine clerkship. ⋯ Bedside teaching of EBM also requires ready access to modern information resources. Other venues for teaching EBM include morning report, teaching conferences, and journal clubs. Many tools can be used to aid the process, including Web-based sources such as UpToDate, textbooks, and Web-based tutorials, educational prescriptions, and critically appraised topics.
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Comparative Study
Nonurgent emergency department patient characteristics and barriers to primary care.
Nonurgent (NU) emergency department (ED) use is at the forefront of medico-political agendas, and diversion of NU patients has been entertained as a management strategy. Before policy changes are implemented, this population should be better understood with respect to their characteristics and reasons for not presenting to primary care providers (PCPs) instead of EDs. This study compares NU with urgent and semiurgent (USU) patients and describes the NU patients' reasons for not seeking care with a PCP before presenting to the ED. ⋯ NU ED patients are different from USU patients and have multiple reasons for not seeking primary care before going to the ED. This may help explain why various diversion strategies have been unsuccessful and indicate that a multifaceted approach may be better suited to this group of patients. The design of new interventions, however, will benefit from further research that clarifies the impact of NU patients on the health care system.
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Comparative Study
The validity of chief complaint and discharge diagnosis in emergency department-based syndromic surveillance.
Emergency department (ED)-based syndromic surveillance systems are being used by public health departments to monitor for outbreaks of infectious diseases, including bioterrorism; however, few systems have been validated. The authors evaluated a "drop-in" syndromic surveillance system by comparing syndrome categorization in the ED with chief complaints and ED discharge diagnoses from medical record review. ⋯ In general, this syndromic surveillance system classified patients into appropriate syndrome categories with fair to good agreement compared with chief complaints and discharge diagnoses. The present findings suggest that use of ED discharge diagnoses, in addition to or instead of chief complaints, may increase surveillance validity for both automated and drop-in syndromic surveillance systems.
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Reduction in emergency department (ED) overcrowding is a major Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) initiative. One major source of ED overcrowding is patients waiting for telemetry beds. ⋯ For patients admitted to the authors' institution with a potential acute coronary syndrome, there was no association between a negative evaluation for underlying coronary artery disease and overall or potentially cardiac ED visits, admissions, or cardiac resource test utilization over the year following the index visit.
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The ideal diagnostic test for the diagnosis of epiglottitis would be simple, rapid, noninvasive, and highly accurate, performed at the bedside, and would not use ionizing radiation. The purpose of this study was to assess the utility of ultrasound to image the epiglottis and to determine the range of normal epiglottis diameter for men and women. ⋯ Bedside ultrasonography is easy to perform and can accurately evaluate the epiglottis. Further analysis should include patients with known epiglottic disease to assess the utility of this technique to detect pathologic enlargement.