Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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The objective was to assess in a pediatric emergency department (ED) the reliability of the color analog scale (CAS) for acute pain assessment, overall and between traumatic and nontraumatic pain etiology. ⋯ The color analog scale is both a valid and a reliable self-reporting tool in the assessment of acute pain in children.
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Although the U. S. population continues to become more diverse, ethnic and racial health care disparities persist. ⋯ The objective of the discussion was to develop strategies to help EM residency programs examine and improve diversity in their respective institutions. Specific recommendations focus on URG applicant selection and recruitment strategies, cultural competence curriculum development, involvement of URG faculty, and the availability of institutional and national resources to improve and maintain diversity in EM training programs.
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Emergency departments (EDs), similar to other health care environments, are concerned with improving the quality of patient care. Older patients comprise a large, growing, and particularly vulnerable subset of ED users. The project objective was to develop ED-specific quality indicators for older patients to help practitioners identify quality gaps and focus quality improvement efforts. ⋯ These quality indicators will help researchers and clinicians target quality improvement efforts. The next steps will be to test the feasibility of capturing the quality indicators in existing medical records and to measure the extent to which each quality indicator is successfully met in current emergency practice.
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The emergency medicine (EM) job market is increasingly focused on incentive-based reimbursement, which is largely based on relative value units (RVUs) and is directly related to documentation of patient care. Previous studies have shown a need to improve resident education in documentation. The authors created a focused educational intervention on billing and documentation practices to meet this identified need. The hypothesis of this study was that this educational intervention would result in an increase in RVUs generated by EM resident physicians and the average amount billed per patient. ⋯ The educational intervention positively affected resident documentation resulting in greater RVUs/hour and greater billing performance in the study emergency department (ED).