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Despite the adage, "If it wasn't documented, it wasn't done," not everything that ED nurses and physicians do is actually documented. The fact is, documentation omissions and errors do occur. The question is, what piece of information is likely to become crucially important from a legal perspective?
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Initial data on the use of cell phone photos of injuries, taken by the patients themselves in the ED at The George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC, offers the promise that they might have the potential to speed treatment without sacrificing diagnostic accuracy.
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Behavioral health issues present an ongoing challenge for ED managers in pediatric as well as adult facilities. To address these challenges, the ED leadership at Akron (OH) Children's Hospital has built a separate area within the department to treat patients with such issues.
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The world of the ED manager changed significantly in July, when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology released the final rule for the definition of the term "meaningful use."
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In this issue: FDA Advisory Committee recommends approval of dabigatran, safety of proton pump inhibitors, effectiveness of glucosamine and chondroitin, FDA Actions.
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Although corticosteroids are beneficial in treating severe exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), studies to date have not shown high-doses (such as methylprednisolone, 2 mg/kg or more per 24 h) administered intravenously (IV) to be superior to lower doses (e.g., prednisone, 40 mg/day) given orally, with respect to clinically important outcomes.
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Paralytic agents such as vecuronium and cis-atracurium have been used as "rescue therapies" in patients with ARDS for many years, but, as with other rescue strategies including prone mechanical ventilation or inhaled vasodilators, evidence of a mortality benefit from this intervention has been lacking.
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Project IMPACT, a proprietary database originally created by the Society for Critical Care Medicine and now maintained by Cerner Corp., collects data from a voluntary consortium of ICUs across America.