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There is no question that hospitals face innumerable challenges in meeting the "meaningful use" of health information technology (HIT) criteria established by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009.
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Five years after the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta issued recommendations calling for all health care settings to routinely screen patients for HIV in areas where HIV prevalence is at 0.1% or higher, the practice has failed to take hold in most EDs, even though many obstacles to testing, such as burdensome informed consent requirements, for example, have been cleared away.
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The potential for violence in the ED is well-recognized and often discussed. Several organizations such as The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA, for example, cite the ED as being one of the most dangerous places in health care to work, and a study completed last year by the Des Plaines, IL-based Emergency Nurses Association noted that every week, between 8% and 13% of ED nurses experience some type of physical violence in the course of doing their jobs.
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In this issue: Apixaban could soon join the anticoagulation market; Chinese herbs for flu; chronic medication and discontinuation after hospitalization; and FDA actions.
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In Part 1 of this two-part series on Pregnancy and Critical Care Medicine (see Critical Care Alert, March 2011, p. 89-93), we reviewed the normal physiologic changes that occur during pregnancy, examining changes occurring across multiple organ systems that affect our management of these patients as well as the ability of the pregnant woman to respond to various forms of stress, such as acute hemorrhage.
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In this prospective study carried out in a 13-bed French medical ICU, Thille and associates sought to determine the clinical characteristics and outcomes of patients who experienced extubation failure the requirement for reintubation within 72 hours of either planned or unplanned extubation.
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Quality measures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and other groups are putting EPs "in a huge bind," according to Sandra Schneider, MD, professor of emergency medicine at University of Rochester (NY) Medical Center.
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If there is absolutely no credible reason to think that a patient's symptoms are due to a heart attack, says John Burton, MD, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Carilion Clinic in Roanoke, VA, you shouldn't be ordering tests such as cardiac enzymes.
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In this article, we present a series of actual clinical scenarios that could have turned out differently if the wrong management decision had been made.
