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What is your No. 1 obstacle to reducing delays and improving patient flow? For many ED managers, the culprit increasingly is inpatients being held in the ED for hours or even days.
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Now that the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations has announced its 2003 National Patient Safety Goals, what are you doing to comply? Technology could be a crucial part of your strategy.
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If you fail to implement effective systems to prevent pediatric medication errors, there can be liability risks for you and your facility.
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Bentley PN, Wilson AG, Derwin ME, et al. Reliability of assigning correct current procedural terminology-4 E/M codes. Ann Emerg Med 2002; 40:269-274.
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Streamlining your ED coding and billing system isnt something you can do alone. It takes the expertise and cooperation of numerous individuals working together on each element of the process. However, the rewards are great both in the areas of improving revenue and assuring conformance with the hospital compliance program.
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Are you giving admitted patients being held in your ED patients the same level of care they would receive in the critical care units? If not, you are violating standards from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations that require the same standard of care be provided.
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This article, the second of two parts, deals with the potentially disastrous situation in which either the patients airway presents a substantial challenge or standard intubation methods have failed.
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Question: Some of our physicians insist on sending their patients to our ED for injections to treat ongoing medical conditions. One patient was scheduled for magnetic resonance imagine (MRI), but due to back pain, he was unable to lie still for the test. The physician ordered a narcotic injection to be given to assist the patient in getting through the test. Even though the MRI was scheduled and the injection order was included with the MRI order, we in the ED refused to administer the medication without a medical screening examination (MSE). The physician was irate, and the patient left unhappy. Did we do the right thing?
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Bronchiolitis is an acute lower respiratory tract infection caused by a virus, resulting in small airway obstruction. Although some classic symptomswheezing, hypoxia, and hyperinflationtypically are associated with bronchiolitis, many young infants may not have wheezing as part of their initial presentation.
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The demographics of our foreign-born population have undergone a polar shift during the past 50 years. Europeans once made up the majority of new arrivals, but Asians and Latin Americans now predominate. Part II of this series will familiarize physicians with some of the infections and diseases specific to immigrants from particular regions of the world.