Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Comparative Study
The financial impact of ambulance diversion on inpatient hospital revenues and profits.
The objective was to study the association between ambulance diversion and weekly inpatient hospital revenues and profits. ⋯ Periods of greater diversion are associated with higher inpatient revenues and profits for ED, electively admitted patients, and the overall inpatient hospital population. Therefore, no financial disincentive exists from an inpatient perspective for the boarding of admitted patients in the ED and increasing periods of diversion. Efforts to decrease ambulance diversion must therefore be based on other rationales, like patient safety, quality of care, and improving access to care, or new models of reimbursement that reward hospitals for reducing ambulance diversion.
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Comparative Study
Measuring quality of care in syncope: case definition affects reported electrocardiogram use but does not bias reporting.
The objective was to calculate agreement between syncope as a reason for visiting (RFV) an emergency department (ED) and as a discharge diagnosis (International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification [ICD-9]), to determine whether syncope case definition biases reported electrocardiogram (ECG) usage, a national quality measure. ⋯ Despite only moderate agreement, syncope case definition should not bias reported ECG rate by patient, visit, or hospital characteristics. Among ED patients with syncope, ECG is performed less frequently in women, a potentially important disparity.
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Fractional excretion of nitric oxide (FE(NO)) has been used as a noninvasive marker to assess and manage chronic asthma in adults and children. The aim of this study was to determine the feasibility of obtaining FE(NO) concentrations in children treated in the emergency department (ED) for acute asthma exacerbation and to examine the association between FE(NO) concentrations and other measures of acute asthma severity. ⋯ Measurement of FE(NO) is difficult for a large proportion of children with acute asthma exacerbation. FE(NO) concentration during an asthma exacerbation does not correlate with other measures of acute severity and has limited utility in the ED management of acute asthma in children.
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Emergency department (ED) crowding is a national crisis that contributes to medical error and system inefficiencies. There is a natural concern that crowding may also adversely affect undergraduate and graduate emergency medicine (EM) education. ⋯ Review of the medical literature demonstrates a small body of evidence that education can flourish in difficult clinical environments where faculty have a high clinical load and to date does not support a direct deleterious effect of crowding on education. To provide a theoretical framework for discussing the impact of crowding on education, the authors present a conceptual model of the effect of ED crowding on education and review possible positive and negative effects on each of the six recognized Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) core competencies.
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In an increasingly diverse patient population, language differences, socioeconomic circumstances, religious values, and cultural practices may present barriers to the delivery of quality care. These obstacles contribute to the health care disparities observed in all areas of medical care. ⋯ The authors present three clinical scenarios highlighting challenges in providing equitable emergency care to minority populations. Using these cases as illustrations, three processes are proposed that may improve the quality of care delivered to minority populations: 1) increase cultural awareness and reduce provider biases, enabling providers to interact more effectively with different patient populations; 2) accommodate patient preferences and needs in medical settings through practice adjustments and cultural modifications; and 3) increase provider diversity to raise levels of tolerance, awareness, and understanding for other cultures and create more racially and/or ethnically concordant patient-physician relationships.