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Current Features New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg stepped into emergency department operations in January with an administrative order restricting the use of pain killers in the city’s emergency departments. While various hospitals are reported to be voluntarily complying (the order lacks legal authority over the 50 hospitals in the city) Bloomberg is on a collision course with a recent ruling from CMS that suggests that those hospitals are in violation of EMTALA. Read moreWhite Coat's Call Room Twice recently, I've been privy to patient complaints about emergency department "misdiagnoses" when patients have gone to follow up appointments with their physicians.
One case involved a young girl who had a rash. The rash was preceded by a low grade... Read moreWhite Coat's Call Room More HealthCare Updates from around the web are at my other blog at http://drwhitecoat.com.
What’s the highest sodium level you’ve seen? These docs saved a patient with a corrected sodium level of 196 which is the highest I’ve ever heard of. Low... Read moreCurrent Features  With the baseball and softball seasons well underway, you are likely to
encounter children with arm pain in the emergency department. Injuries
to the elbow and shoulder in the pediatric throwing athlete are
relatively prevalent and result from a variety of factors, including
skeletal immaturity, poor mechanics, and overuse.
Read moreCurrent Features
Current Features
Current Features Merely utter the term “patient satisfaction” among most emergency physicians and you’ll quickly see us retreat into a world of skepticism and exasperation. The term has become symbolic of a never-ending battle over flawed data and an inaccurate evaluation of our performance. Read moreWhite Coat's Call Room More HealthCare Updates from around the web are at my other blog at http://drwhitecoat.com.
Remember the case where hospital administrator Bruce Mogel allegedly planted a gun in a doctor’s car then called the police to frame him because the administ... Read moreWhite Coat's Call Room I think I've discovered what elderly patients feel like when everyone thinks that they're too senile to understand the conversations around them and just talk about them as if they aren't there. Like this ...
In one emergency department, the nurses r... Read moreCurrent Features In room six sat a typical 78-year-old nursing home patient with the history of a cough and low grade fever. She was pleasantly confused but followed instructions; grey and wrinkled but otherwise she looked better than most. Her vitals were normal. We found no fever at the time of triage and she had received no antipyretics. Read moreWhite Coat's Call Room Remember that whole line about how Press Ganey won't create reports or analyze statistics based on fewer than 7 surveys?
Yeah. That's not true.
This report which was sent to me by a reader shows that the involved doctor was in Press Ganey's 99th per... Read moreWhite Coat's Call Room More HealthCare Updates from around the web are at my other blog at http://drwhitecoat.com.
Next on the FDA hit list … sleeping pills. Number of ED visits related to Ambien prescriptions triples between 2005 and 2010.
Connecticut emergency depart... Read more |
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The April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings brought the sobering reality of
domestic terrorism back to the United States. Yet amidst the carnage and
chaos that followed the explosions emerged a superb response by the
Boston EMS system and the emergency medicine community. 
The routine use of contrast (both oral and IV, and certainly rectal) is
unnecessary for the majority of abdominal CT scans performed in the ED.
At least that is what the literature says over and over.