Fair Play: Application of Normalized Scoring to Emergency Department Throughput Quality Measures in a National Registry.

Study Objective: The measurement of emergency department (ED) throughput as a patient-centered quality measure is ubiquitous; however, marked heterogeneity exists between EDs, complicating comparisons for payment purposes. We evaluate 4 scoring methodologies for accommodating differences in ED visit volume and heterogeneity among ED groups that staff multiple EDs to improve the validity and "fairness" of ED throughput quality measurement in a national registry, with the goal of developing a volume-adjusted throughput measure that balances variation at the ED group level.

Methods: We conducted an ED group-level analysis using the 2017 American College of Emergency Physicians Clinical Emergency Data Registry data set, which included 548 ED groups inclusive of 889 unique EDs.

Improving Communication Between the Emergency Department and Radiology Department With a Novel Web-Based Tool in an Urban Academic Center.

Description Of Problem: Streamlining communication between radiology and referring services is vital to ensure appropriate care with minimal delays. Increased subspecialization has led to compartmentalization of the radiology department with many physicians working in disparate areas. At our hospital, we anecdotally noted that a significant portion of incoming phone calls were misdirected to the wrong workstations.

Effects of simultaneous perturbations of voice pitch and loudness feedback on voice F0 and amplitude control.

Perturbations in either voice pitch or loudness feedback lead to changes in a speaker's voice fundamental frequency (F0) or amplitude. Voice pitch or loudness perturbations were presented individually (either pitch or loudness shift stimuli) or simultaneously (pitch combined with loudness shift stimuli) to subjects sustaining a vowel to test the hypothesis that the mechanisms for these two response types are independent. For simultaneous perturbations, pitch and loudness both changed in the same direction or in opposite directions.