Brief Research Report Archives - Page 6 of 8 - The Western Journal of Emergency Medicine

Residency Applicants Prefer Online System for Scheduling Interviews

Volume 16, Issue 2, March 2015
Charlotte Wills, MD et al.

Residency coordinators may be overwhelmed when scheduling residency interviews. Applicants often have to coordinate interviews with multiple programs at once, and relying on verbal or email confirmation may delay the process. Our objective was to determine applicant mean time to schedule and satisfaction using online scheduling.

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Emergency Medicine Residency Boot Camp Curriculum: A Pilot Study

Volume 16, Issue 2, March 2015
Ramsey Ataya, BS et al.

Establishing a boot camp curriculum is pertinent for emergency medicine (EM) residents in order to develop proficiency in a large scope of procedures and leadership skills. In this article, we describe our program’s EM boot camp curriculum as well as measure the confidence levels of resident physicians through a pre- and post-boot camp survey.

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Population Health Research Design

Feasibility of Tablet Computer Screening for Opioid Abuse in the Emergency Department

Volume 16 Issue 1, January 2015
Scott G. Weiner, MD, MPH et al.

Tablet computer-based screening may have the potential for detecting patients at risk for opioid abuse in the emergency department (ED). Study objectives were a) to determine if the revised Screener and Opioid Assessment for Patients with Pain (SOAPP®-R), a 24-question previously paper-based screening tool for opioid abuse potential, could be administered on a tablet computer to an ED patient population; b) to demonstrate that >90% of patients can complete the electronic screener without assistance in <5 minutes and; c) to determine patient ease of use with screening on a tablet computer.

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Emergency Department Operations

Effect of an Emergency Department Fast Track on Press-Ganey Patient Satisfaction Scores

Volume 16, Issue 1, January 2015
Calvin E. Hwang, MD et al.

Mandated patient surveys have become an integral part of Medicare remuneration, putting hundreds of millions of dollars in funding at risk. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced a patient experience survey for the emergency department (ED).

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Emergency Department Operations

Waiting for Triage: Unmeasured Time in Patient Flow

Volume 16, Issue 1, January 2015
Christopher Houston, MD et al.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) requires reporting of multiple time-sensitive metrics. Most facilities use triage time as the time of arrival. Little is known about how long patients wait prior to triage. As reimbursement to the hospital may be tied to these metrics, it is essential to accurately record the time of arrival.

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Do Emergency Department Patients Receive a Pathological Diagnosis? A Nationally-Representative Sample

Volume 16, Issue 1, January 2015
Leana S. Wen, MD, MSc et al.

Understanding the cause of patients’ symptoms often requires identifying a pathological diagnosis. A single-center study found that many patients discharged from the emergency department (ED) do not receive a pathological diagnosis.

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Polysubstance Abuse: Alcohol, Opioids and Benzodiazepines Require Coordinated Engagement by Society, Patients, and Physicians

Volume 16, Issue 1, January 2015
Uzor C. Ogbu, MD, PhD et al.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published significant data trends related to substance abuse involving opioid pain relievers (OPR), benzodiazepines and alcohol in the United States. The CDC describes opioid misuse and abuse as an epidemic, with the use of OPR surpassing that of illicit drugs.

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Screening for Sexual Orientation in Psychiatric Emergency Departments

Volume 16, Issue 1, January 2015
Glenn W. Currier, MD, MPH et al.

Our goal was to explore whether emergency department (ED) patients would disclose their sexual orientation in a research evaluation and to examine demographic and clinical characteristics of patients by self-identified sexual orientation.

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Healthcare Utilization

American Academy of Pediatrics 2014 Bronchiolitis Guidelines: Bonfire of the Evidence

Volume 16, Issue 1, January 2015
Paul Walsh, MD, MSc et al.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 2014 Bronchiolitis guidelines (the guidelines) were recently published in the official journal of the AAP, Pediatrics. The committee that wrote the guidelines anticipates that these will form the basis of bronchiolitis treatment throughout the house of medicine, not just in pediatricians’ offices.

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A Review of Lawsuits Related to Point-of-Care Emergency Ultrasound Applications

Volume 16, Issue 1, January 2015
Lori Stolz, MD et al.

New medical technology brings the potential of lawsuits related to the usage of that new technology. In recent years the use of point-of-care (POC) ultrasound has increased rapidly in the emergency department (ED).

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Prehospital Care

Availability and Utilization of Cardiac Resuscitation Centers

Volume 15, Issue 7, November 2014
Bryn E. Mumma, MD, MAS et al.

The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends regionalized care following out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) at cardiac resuscitation centers (CRCs).

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Estimation of Laceration Length by Emergency Department Personnel

Volume 15, Issue 7, November 2014
Christina L. Bourne, MD et al.

Documentation and billing for laceration repair involves a description of wound length. We designed this study to test the hypothesis that emergency department (ED) personnel can accurately estimate wound lengths without the aid of a measuring device.

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Osteopathic Emergency Medicine Programs Infrequently Publish in High-Impact Emergency Medicine Journals

Volume 15, Issue 7, November 2014
Sean M Baskin, MA et al.

Both the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) require core faculty to engage in scholarly work, including publication in peer-reviewed journals.

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Pilot Study of Ultrasound-Guided Corticosteroid Hip Injections by Emergency Physicians

Volume 15, Issue 7, November 2014
Erik S. Anderson, MD et al.

Our objective was to assess the efficacy of ultrasound-guided hip injections performed by emergency physicians (EPs) for the treatment of chronic hip pain in an outpatient clinic setting.

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Sondeo de Publicaciones y el índice-H en Profesores Académicos de Medicina de Emergencia

Volume 15, Issue 3, May 2014
Babineau MR, MD et al.

El número de publicaciones y la frecuencia en que éstas son citadas juegan un rol en las promociones académicas. Se han propuesto bibliométricas que intentan cuantificar el impacto relativo del trabajo académico. El índice-H se define como el número (h) de publicaciones para un individuo que ha sido citado como mínimo en h cantidad de veces. Nosotros calculamos el índice-H y el número de publicaciones para académicos de medicina de emergencia con el rango de profesor.

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Emergency Department Access

Who’s Boarding in the Psychiatric Emergency Service?

Volume 15, Issue 6, September 2014
Scott A. Simpson, MD, MPH et al.

When a psychiatric patient in the emergency department requires inpatient admission, but no bed is available, they may become a “boarder.” The psychiatric emergency service (PES) has been suggested as one means to reduce psychiatric boarding, but the frequency and characteristics of adult PES boarders have not been described.

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Marginal Cost Analysis of Two Train-the-Trainer Models for Implementing SafeCare

Volume 15, Issue 5, August 2014
Phaedra S. Corso, PhD, MPA et al.

In adopting evidence-based practices (EBP), program administrators most frequently focus on program effectiveness. But there is growing recognition of the importance of program cost and of economic analysis for allocating scarce resources for prevention and intervention programs.1 Economic analysis includes the assessment of programmatic costs using a micro-costing approach (precise individual resource valuation) to value the resources required to implement programmatic processes and activities so that programs can be compared to each other.

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Demographic and Psychosocial Characteristics of Mobile Phone Ownership and Usage among Youth Living in the Slums of Kampala, Uganda

Volume 15, Issue 5, August 2014
Monica H. Swahn, PhD, MPH et al.

The use of mobile phones and other technology for improving health through research and practice is growing quickly, in particular in areas with difficult-to-reach population or where the research infrastructure is less developed. In Sub-Saharan Africa, there appears to be a dramatic increase in mobile phone ownership and new initiatives that capitalize on this technology to support health promotion campaigns to change behavior and to increase health literacy.

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Novel Ultrasound Guidance System for Real-time Central Venous Cannulation: Safety and Efficacy

Volume 15, Issue 4, July 2014
Robinson M. Ferre, MD et al.

Real-time ultrasound guidance is considered to be the standard of care for central venous access for non-emergent central lines. However, adoption has been slow, in part because of the technical challenges and time required to become proficient. The AxoTrack® system (Soma Access Systems, Greenville, SC) is a novel ultrasound guidance system recently cleared for human use by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

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Emergency Department Operations

Unrecognized Hypoxia and Respiratory Depression in Emergency Department Patients Sedated For Psychomotor Agitation: Pilot Study

Volume 15, Issue 4, July 2014
Kenneth Deitch, DO et al.

The incidence of respiratory depression in patients who are chemically sedated in the emergency department (ED) is not well understood. As the drugs used for chemical restraint are respiratory depressants, improving respiratory monitoring practice in the ED may be warranted. The objective of this study is to describe the incidence of respiratory depression in patients chemically sedated for violent behavior and psychomotor agitation in the ED.

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Survey of Publications and the H-index of Academic Emergency Medicine Professors

Volume 15, Issue 3, May 2014
Matthew Babineau, MD et al.

The number of publications and how often these have been cited play a role in academic promotion. Bibliometrics that attempt to quantify the relative impact of scholarly work have been proposed. The h-index is defined as the number (h) of publications for an individual that have been cited at least h times. We calculated the h-index and number of publications for academic emergency physicians at the rank of professor.

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Healthcare Utilization

Depression is Associated with Repeat Emergency Department Visits in Patients with Non-specific Abdominal Pain

Volume 15, Issue 3, May 2014
Andrew Charles Meltzer, MD et al.

Patients with abdominal pain often return multiple times despite no definitive diagnosis. Our objective was to determine if repeat emergency department (ED) use among patients with non-specific abdominal pain might be associated with a diagnosis of moderate to severe depressive disorder.

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Prospective Analysis of Single Operator Sonographic Optic Nerve Sheath Diameter Measurement for Diagnosis of Elevated Intracranial Pressure

Volume 15, Issue 2, March 2014
Erica Frumin, MD et al.

The accurate diagnosis of elevated intracranial pressure (eICP) in the emergent setting is a critical determination that presents significant challenges. Several studies show correlation of sonographic optic nerve sheath diameter (ONSD) to eICP, while others show high inter-observer variability or marginal performance with less experienced sonographers. The objective of our study is to assess the ability of bedside ultrasound measurement of ONSD to identify the presence of eICP when performed by a single experienced sonographer. We hypothesize that ONSD measurement is sensitive and specific for detecting eICP and can be correlated with values obtained by external ventricular device (EVD).

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Impact of Learners on Emergency Medicine Attending Physician Productivity

Volume XV, February 2014
Rahul Bhat, MD et al.

Several prior studies have examined the impact of learners (medical students or residents) on overall emergency department (ED) flow as well as the impact of resident training level on the number of patients seen by residents per hour. No study to date has specifically examined the impact of learners on emergency medicine (EM) attending physician productivity, with regards to patients per hour (PPH). We sought to evaluate whether learners increase, decrease, or have no effect on the productivity of EM attending physicians in a teaching program with one student or resident per attending.

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Emergency Department Operations

Does High Body Mass Index Obviate the Need for Oral Contrast in Emergency Department Patients?

Volume 14, Issue 6, November 2013
Matthew L. Harrison, DO, et al.

Do higher BMI values sufficiently enhance the ability of a radiologist to read a computed tomography (CT) of the abdomen and pelvis, so that the need for oral contrast to be given is precluded?

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Healthcare Utilization

Effectiveness of a Drill-assisted Intraosseous Catheter versus Manual Intraosseous Catheter by Resident Physicians in a Swine Model

Our objective was to compare the effectiveness, speed, and complication rate of the traditional manually placed intraosseous (IO) catheter to a mechanical drill-assisted IO catheter by emergency medicine (EM) resident physicians in a training environment.

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