Telehealth equity and access communication skills pilot simulation for practicing clinicians.

Objectives: This pilot study evaluated a telehealth training simulation program for practicing clinicians, specifically focused on addressing patient issues of equity and access to healthcare via improving telehealth communication.

Methods: Participants participated in a one-hour simulation experience with two cases. Performance was assessed pre- and post-intervention using a checklist measuring communication domains related to equity and access in telehealth.

A Hospice Transitions Program for Patients in the Emergency Department.

Importance: Patients often visit the emergency department (ED) near the end of life. Their common disposition is inpatient hospital admission, which can result in a delayed transition to hospice care and, ultimately, an inpatient hospital death that may be misaligned with their goals of care.

Objective: To assess the association of hospice use with a novel multidisciplinary hospice program to rapidly identify and enroll eligible patients presenting to the ED near end of life.

Changes in low-acuity patient volume in an emergency department after launching a walk-in clinic.

Objective: Unscheduled low-acuity care options are on the rise and are often expected to reduce emergency department (ED) visits. We opened an ED-staffed walk-in clinic (WIC) as an alternative care location for low-acuity patients at a time when ED visits exceeded facility capacity and the impending flu season was anticipated to increase visits further, and we assessed whether low-acuity ED patient visits decreased after opening the WIC.

Methods: In this retrospective cohort study, we compared patient and clinical visit characteristics of the ED and WIC patients and conducted interrupted time-series analyses to quantify the impact of the WIC on low-acuity ED patient visit volume and the trend.

A body bag can save your life: a novel method of cold water immersion for heat stroke treatment.

Non-exertional heat stroke is a life-threatening condition characterized by passive exposure to high ambient heat, a core body temperature of 40°C (104°F) or greater, and central nervous system dysfunction. Rapid cooling is imperative to minimize mortality and morbidity. Although evaporative and convective measures are often used for cooling heat stroke patients, cold water immersion produces the fastest cooling.

Impact of Scribes with Flow Coordination Duties on Throughput in an Academic Emergency Department.

Introduction: With the increasing influence of electronic health records in emergency medicine came concerns of decreasing operational efficiencies. Particularly worrisome was increasing patient length of stay (LOS). Medical scribes were identified to be in a good position to quickly address barriers to treatment delivery and patient flow.

Applying Design Thinking Principles to Curricular Development in Medical Education.

Medical education is an ever-evolving field, resulting in numerous changes and modifications to curricular structure, learner assessment, feedback, and remediation. To best meet the needs of the individual learners, it is important to design curricula that meet their needs. Design thinking (DT) first gained popularity in the 1960s and, since then, has been applied to problem solving within business, primary education, and medicine.