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Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are frequently encountered in clinical medicine. According to the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 2.8 million infections with Chlamydia trachomatis and 700,000 infections with Neisseria gonorrhea occur annually in the United States.
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The ED is a common setting for the initial evaluation of emotional and behavioral disorders, including suicidal behavior or attempts. In the United States, approximately 2 million adolescents attempt suicide each year. As the number of visits by adolescents to the ED rises and the availability of outpatient mental health services diminishes, the ED physician must be not only able to stabilize the patient medically, but also should be comfortable with differentiating organic from psychiatric disease, performing a targeted psychosocial interview, initiating treatment, and arranging for disposition.
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You know there is a problem when the average wait time to see a provider is in the four-to-five-hour range, and 3% to 7% of incoming patients are routinely leaving the ED without being seen (LWBS).
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The Joint Commission (TJC) is in the process of developing new tools, solutions, and performance measures aimed at improving the processes used to transition patients from one health care setting to another.
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While studies show that most people come to the ED because of an urgent or emergent medical concern, some people wind up in an emergency setting because they are not plugged in to the kind of social or medical resources that could more appropriately meet their needs.
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In an effort to drive down health care expenditures, a key target of state legislatures and health care policy makers in recent years has been frequent users of the ED.
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Coding patterns for emergency services have been scrutinized in the press recently.
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Your ED patient has the right to receive a medical screening examination and a thorough evaluation, but he or she does not have a legal right to obtain specific pain medications, according to Knox H. Todd, MD, MPH, professor and chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
