Articles: emergency-department.
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Disruptive technologies are revolutionising continuing professional development in emergency medicine and critical care (EMCC). Data on EMCC blogs and podcasts were gathered prospectively from 2002 through November 2013. During this time there was a rapid expansion of EMCC websites, from two blogs and one podcast in 2002 to 141 blogs and 42 podcasts in 2013. This paper illustrates the explosive growth of EMCC websites and provides a foundation that will anchor future research in this burgeoning field.
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Emergency department (ED) visits have continued to rise, and frequent ED users account for up to 8% of all ED visits. Reducing visits by frequent ED users may be one way to help reduce health care costs. We hypothesize that frequent users have unique ED utilization patterns resulting in differences in health care charges. ⋯ Frequent users have unique medical and social characteristics; however, disposition and visit charges did not differ from nonfrequent users.
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Sepsis is a serious condition with high mortality. Early treatment improves outcome and can be initiated by emergency medical services (EMS) personnel.The primary aim of our study was to investigate how many sepsis patients are transported by EMS to the internist at the emergency department (ED). The secondary aims were to compare these EMS patients with patients who arrived at the ED otherwise and to investigate how these patients were managed. We further investigated how often the diagnosis sepsis/infection was documented by EMS. ⋯ Half of the patients with sepsis arrive at the ED by EMS. These patients are seriously ill, and although these patients are likely to benefit from early treatment, they are often transported with nonurgent rides and both assessment of vital signs and early start of treatment are not routinely performed.
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Catatonia was first described by a German psychiatrist, Karl Kahlbaum, in 1874. It is a behavioral syndrome marked by an inability to move normally, which can occur in the context of many underlying general medical and psychiatric disorders. A wide variety of neurologic, metabolic, drug-induced, and psychiatric causes of catatonia have been reported. ⋯ After extensive emergency department testing, including negative computed tomography head, negative magnetic resonance imaging brain, negative electroencephalogram, and normal laboratory results, the patient was diagnosed with new-onset bipolar disorder with depressive features presenting as catatonia. Recognizing catatonia is important because it may be caused or exacerbated by treatment of the underlying disorder. Failure to institute treatment early in the course of catatonia is associated with a poor prognosis.
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Performance of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) within 90 minutes of hospital arrival for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction patients is a commonly cited clinical quality measure. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services use this measure to adjust hospital reimbursement via the Value-Based Purchasing Program. This study investigated the relationship between hospital performance on this quality measure and emergency department (ED) operational efficiency. ⋯ Better performance on measures associated with ED efficiency is associated with more timely PCI performance.