Personalized Care Plans: Are They Effective in Decreasing ED Visits and Health Care Expenditure Among Adult Super-Utilizers?

Problem: Super-utilizers comprise 4.5% to 8% of all ED patients, but account for 21% to 28% of all ED visits. Excessive use of the emergency department contributes to increased health care costs, recurrent and unnecessary ED workup, decreased emergency readiness, and reduced staff morale.

Does the addition of Vocera hands-free communication device improve interruptions in an academic emergency department?

Objective: Emergency department (ED) interruptions occur frequently. Recently, a hands-free communication device (HCD; Vocera) was added to the population of communications devices (a cellular telephone and a pager) in our ED. The research purpose was to determine whether this addition improved interruption times and our hypothesis was the device would decrease length of interruptions.