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 …
Reporting Patient Safety Events in the Emergency Department
You are a physician caring for a 4-year-old patient in the Emergency Department (ED) presenting with a fever. Before ordering Acetaminophen for the patient, you check the patient’s weight on the emergency record, which you read as 17kg. You then write an order based on this weight. The ED nurse checks the order to see if the medication dose is safe using the hospital medication formulary. After that, the nurse approaches you and …
Taking a Sexual History in the ED
A complete sexual history is important in the investigation of several emergency department (ED) presentations. This is often challenging for students, as it can feel intimidating and uncomfortable to breach this topic with patients. Also, the setting of the ED is not inherently conducive to conversations like these, given the lack of established patient-staff rapport and perceived lack of privacy and time. As such, an organized approach with attention to the environment and …