Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Multicenter Study Comparative Study Observational Study
Emergency Physicians Are Able to Detect Right Ventricular Dilation with Good Agreement Compared to Cardiology.
Focused cardiac ultrasound (FOCUS) is a useful tool in evaluating patients presenting to the emergency department (ED) with acute dyspnea. Prior work has shown that right ventricular (RV) dilation is associated with repeat hospitalizations and shorter life expectancy. Traditionally, RV assessment has been evaluated by cardiologist-interpreted comprehensive echocardiography. The primary goal of this study was to determine the inter-rater reliability between emergency physicians (EPs) and a cardiologist for determining RV dilation on FOCUS performed on ED patients with acute dyspnea. ⋯ Emergency physician sonographers are able to detect RV dilation with good agreement when compared to cardiology. These results support the wider use of EP-performed FOCUS to evaluate for RV dilation in ED patients with dyspnea.
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The objective was to estimate D-dimer interval likelihood ratios (iLRs) for diagnosing pulmonary embolism (PE). ⋯ A decision strategy based on these approximate iLRs agrees with several published strategies.
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The objective was to characterize geriatric patients' use of online health information (OHI) relative to younger adults and assess their comfort ith OHI compared to health information (HI) from their physician. ⋯ Although many older patients used OHI, they were less likely than younger adults to use the Internet immediately prior to an ED visit. Despite often using OHI, patients of all age groups found healthcare information from their doctor easier to understand and more trustworthy than information from the Internet. As health systems work to efficiently provide information to patients, addressing these perceived deficiencies may be necessary to build effective OHI programs.