Family medicine residents remain unaware of hospital charges for diagnostic testing.

Background And Objectives: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has mandated that resident training programs incorporate instruction on the economic reality of health care. Studies over the past 15 years have demonstrated that resident physicians, as well as physicians in practice, are unaware of the charges associated with commonly ordered diagnostic tests. The last study to document family medicine residents' knowledge of the hospital charges associated with diagnostic studies was published over 10 years ago.

Does early ED CT scanning of afebrile patients with first episodes of acute pancreatitis ever change management?

Rising utilization of computed tomography (CT) imaging early in the course of acute pancreatitis (AP) has been recently reported. However, radiographic demonstration of the degree of necrosis or the presence of complications is not fully apparent within the first days of an acute attack. The objective of this study was to examine if CT scanning early in the course of disease (<48 h of symptoms) in afebrile patients with an emergency department (ED) diagnosis of first episode of AP revealed any unanticipated pathology that altered clinical management.

The Pulmonary Embolism Rule-Out Criteria rule in a community hospital ED: a retrospective study of its potential utility.

Background: The Pulmonary Embolism Rule-Out Criteria (PERC) rule identifies patients who can be safely discharged from the emergency department (ED) without undergoing laboratory or radiological investigation for possible pulmonary embolism (PE). It was shown to be 99% sensitive in a large validation series. Our objective was to assess the PERC rule's performance in a representative US community hospital.

A user's guide to the NINDS rt-PA stroke trial database.

Robert Dachs and colleagues describe the process for researchers to acquire and decipher the dataset from the original NINDS rt-PA trial.