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Not content with a 30-minute guarantee that it has been offering its ED patients for six years, Michigan's Oakwood Healthcare System has declared that patients will now be seen as soon as they walk though the ED doors. So far, so good, say ED staffers, who concede that the new approach could not have been accomplished by the ED alone.
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Members of the ED staff at Blount Memorial Hospital in Maryville, TN, have cut the door-to-doc time from one hour to 45 minutes, and they hope to get it below 30 minutes, following a new initiative using a process called multivariable testing (MVT).
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Citing a lack of consistency and complete information in ED discharge forms for patients with mild-trauma brain injury (MTBI), researchers at the University of Buffalo (NY) have proposed a new discharge form they say reflects the key risk factors outlined in research literature. Their findings are reported in the August 2006 issue of Brain Injury.
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Noting that only about one-third of hospitals provide emergency care to heart attack patients quickly enough to meet scientific guidelines for saving lives, the American College of Cardiology (ACC) has debuted a campaign called "D2B: An Alliance for Quality," aimed at helping EDs and their hospitals cut an average of 30 minutes off their door-to-balloon (D2B) times by adopting six core strategies:
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A new web-based mapping system in Loma Linda, CA, provides EDs and emergency service organizations in a wide geographical area with real-time information that helps ensure that accident and disaster victims will get to the closest available ED in the shortest possible time. Called AEGIS (Advanced Emergency Geographic Information Systems), it was developed by the Redlands, CA-based Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) for the Center for Prehospital Care, Education, and Research at Loma Linda University Medical Center.
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What causes missed diagnoses in the ED? A research team from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston decided that one of the best places to seek the answer was in actual malpractice cases, so they reviewed 122 closed malpractice claims from four liability insurers in which patients had alleged a missed or delayed diagnosis in the ED. Their findings?
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Because of adverse effects, special care should be used when prescribing the atypical antipsychotic drugs for patients with dementia.
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Surgery for epilepsy in and around sensory-motor cortex can be effective in controlling seizures, but mild post-operative neurological deficits are not uncommon in patients operated on after age 25.
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Patients show reversible MRI signal abnormalities in the CA-1 sector of the hippocampal cornu ammonis early in the course of TGA. They are not correlated with any specific clinical or memory features of the episode.
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Patients with coronary artery disease who have received intra-coronary, drug-eluding stents (DES) may benefit from longer courses of clopidogrel than is currently standard.
