Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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problems with on-call specialist physician coverage have been identified as a significant issue for our nation's health care system. Despite this, little is known about the full extent of these coverage deficiencies in emergency departments (EDs), their effect on emergency care provision, or the subsequent effect on patient flow should specialist-requiring patients need to be transferred to centers of higher-level care. The objective was to report the experiences of a national sample of ED directors regarding the degree of difficulty in providing specialist coverage and the effect of on-call coverage problems on emergency patient care. ⋯ difficulties in obtaining specialty on-call coverage are a pervasive issue for EDs at the national level. Emergency care provision appears to have been affected, and this issue is further impacted by a perceived unreliability in current on-call coverage provision as well as the attrition of coverage for individual specialties.
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The demands on emergency services have grown relentlessly, and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has asserted the need for "regionalized, coordinated, and accountable emergency care systems throughout the country." There are large gaps in the evidence base needed to fix the problem of how emergency care is organized and delivered, and science is urgently needed to define and measure success in the emerging network of emergency care. In 2010, Academic Emergency Medicine convened a consensus conference entitled "Beyond Regionalization: Integrated Networks of Emergency Care." This article is a product of the conference breakout session on "Defining and Measuring Successful Networks"; it explores the concept of integrated emergency care delivery and prioritizes a research agenda for how to best define and measure successful networks of emergency care. The authors discuss five key areas: 1) the fundamental metrics that are needed to measure networks across time-sensitive and non-time-sensitive conditions; 2) how networks can be scalable and nimble and can be creative in terms of best practices; 3) the potential unintended consequences of networks of emergency care; 4) the development of large-scale, yet feasible, network data systems; and 5) the linkage of data systems across the disease course. These knowledge gaps must be filled to improve the quality and efficiency of emergency care and to fulfill the IOM's vision of regionalized, coordinated, and accountable emergency care systems.
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The ideal emergency care system delivers the right care to the right patient at the right time and yields appropriate patient outcomes at a sustainable overall cost. Transforming the current system of emergency care into the Institute of Medicine's vision of a coordinated, regionalized, and accountable emergency care system requires careful consideration of administrative challenges and barriers. Left unaddressed, certain processes, systems, and structures may prevent integration efforts or threaten long-term viability.
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Patient-centered care is defined by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) as care that is responsive to individual patient needs and values and that guides the treatment decisions. This article is a result of a breakout session of the 2010 Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM) consensus conference and describes the process of developing consensus-based recommendations for providing patient-centered emergency care. ⋯ Four consensus-based recommendations were developed on the following themes: enhancing communication and patient advocacy in emergency departments (EDs), facilitating care coordination after discharge, defining metrics for patient-centered care, and placing the locus of control of medical information into patients' hands. The set of research priorities based on these recommendations was created to promote research and advance knowledge in this dimension of clinical care.