Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Multicenter Study
Critical Review, Development and Testing of a Taxonomy for Adverse Events and Near Misses in the Emergency Department.
An adverse event (AE) is a physical harm experienced by a patient due to health care, requiring intervention. Describing and categorizing AEs is important for quality and safety assessment and identifying areas for improvement. Safety science suggests that improvement efforts should focus on preventing and mitigating harm rather than on error, which is commonplace but infrequently leads to AEs. Most taxonomies fail to describe harm experienced by patients (e.g., hypoxia, hemorrhage, anaphylaxis), focusing instead on errors, and use categorizations that are too broad to be useful (e.g., "communication error"). We set out to create a patient-centered, emergency department (ED)-specific framework for describing AEs and near misses to advance quality and safety in the acute care setting. ⋯ We developed a taxonomy of AEs and near misses for the ED, modified from an existing framework. Testing of the tool with minimal training yielded high performance and good inter-rater reliability. This taxonomy can be adapted and modified by EDs seeking to enhance their quality and safety reviews and characterize harm occurring in their EDs for quality improvement purposes.
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Multicenter Study
Capturing Emergency Department Discharge Quality with the Care Transitions Measure: A Pilot Study.
Recent attention has been given to developing measures to capture the quality of ED transitions of care. We examined the utility of a patient-reported measure of transitional care, the Care Transitions Measure-3 (CTM-3), in the ED setting and its association with outcomes of care after ED discharge. ⋯ The CTM-3 is associated with outcomes of care after an ED visit, including ED return visits and medication adherence, and may have utility as a patient-reported measure of ED transitions of care.
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Quantifying and benchmarking scholarly productivity of emergency medicine faculty is challenging. While performance indicators including publication and citation counts are available, use of indicators to create normative references has lagged. The authors developed methodology to benchmark emergency medicine academician scholarly productivity (e.g., publications over time) and impact (e.g., citations per publication over time) against an appropriate reference group. ⋯ This benchmarking method can serve as a model for norm-based scaling of scholarly productivity for emergency medicine. This has important implications for performance review, promotion and hiring, and evaluating group productivity.