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Every year at about this time, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) publishes its final Out-patient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) payment rule for the following calendar year, and every year emergency medicine experts express their dissatisfaction with one aspect or another of what CMS has wrought. This year, however, might prove to be an exception.
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As part of its Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) payment rule for 2009, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has established a multiple imaging composite methodology, which means it will provide a single composite ambulatory payment classification (APC) payment each time a hospital bills more than one procedure from an imaging "family" on a single date of service. The families are:
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If someone told you that an ED had experienced a 60% increase in volume between 2000 and 2008, you wouldn't be surprised to learn that the average length of stay (LOS) for their patients also had increased dramatically.
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With pulmonary computed tomographic (CT) angiography increasingly used to diagnose acute pulmonary thromboembolism (PE), it has become commonplace to report not only the presence of clot when the study is positive, but also an estimate of the clot burden.
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The lung-protective effects of low tidal volumes, as demonstrated by the ARDSnet study, are well accepted in patients with acute lung injury (ALI) or acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).
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In the issue: 5-á reductase inhibitors and hip fracture in men; the effects of drug-reimbursement policy on outcomes; new guidelines for type 2 diabetes; beta-blocker-associated brady-cardia is linked to CVD events; FDA Updates.
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Investigators in the Department of Neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, reviewed the charts of patients admitted with myasthenic crisis (MC) between 1987 and 2006 who received either invasive or noninvasive mechanical ventilation.
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Tracheostomy confers patient benefits such as decreasing laryngeal irritation, improving patient communication, and decreasing sedation requirements, but the optimal timing of this procedure in critically ill patients remains a subject of considerable debate.
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Victims of blunt trauma are frequently encountered in the emergency department (ED). Forty percent of all ED visits each year are attributed to injury, which equates to about 40 million ED visits annually. Additionally, approximately one-third of intensive care unit (ICU) admissions in the United States are trauma-related.
