LeBron was in the last few months of his emergency medicine (EM) residency and was tasked with presenting morbidity and mortality (M&M) rounds during an EM rotation. Between clinical shifts and incessant studying for his exam, he carved out time to prepare the rounds. Although he had been a participant in many M&M rounds, he realized that he had never presented at one. He didn’t have a good case to present and wondered …
5 Things You Should Know About Elder Abuse in the ED
Studies suggest that the prevalence of elder abuse in high-income countries sits at around 7.6-10%.1 As individuals age, there can be a decline in social connections and even primary care visits. ED visits can be one of the only points of contact outside their immediate living environment, making this a crucial setting for identification of elder abuse.2 It’s a statistical certainty that anyone working in health care has encountered several victims of elder …
Artificial intelligence in emergency medicine: beyond the hype
During a busy night shift, you are reading a series of chest X-rays when you overhear a colleague remark, “This will all be replaced by computers soon, anyways”. You think back to a few Tweets on artificial intelligence in medicine and wonder if her comment has merit. There has been so much hype about the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years, much of which is optimistic and some of which is …
Checklists and the Hierarchy of Effectiveness
You are working a particularly busy overnight solo coverage shift when a very sick 4-year old patient with respiratory distress begins desatting requiring urgent intubation. A team is quickly assembled and preparation is completed for the procedure. You begin attempting endotracheal tube insertion but after two failed attempts with direct laryngoscopy you ask for a bougie, and none is delivered. You ask again, and nothing. As you momentarily take your eyes off of …
Expert’s Corner – Dr. Kaveh Shojania on Common QI Pitfalls
Welcome to another HiQuiPS post! Our series has aimed to present foundational topics in Health informatics, Quality Improvement and Patient Safety in a practical manner. In this new section – Expert’s Corner, we ask an expert some important questions to deepen our understanding of these sciences and improve our implementation. For our inaugural Expert’s Corner post, we invited Dr. Kaveh Shojania. Dr. Shojania is the Vice Chair (Quality & Innovation) in the Department …
Teaching EBM? You can sim that!
If you’re in medicine, you’ve probably had to sit through at least one literature searching session. You were probably introduced to a long list of acronyms (most of which you’ve long forgotten) representing different literature databases. Perhaps you were asked to try out a search strategy in some of these databases, which you carefully assembled line by line. Did you ever wonder what the goal of these sessions were? Not sufficiently in depth …