About Eric Blazar, MD

Clinical Assistant Professor
Department of Emergency Medicine
Rowan University
Inspira Medical Center

Improving Your ED Efficiency: Upgrade This Elusive Skill

Improving Your ED Efficiency ALiEMU emergency department

No specialty in medicine requires “efficiency” more than Emergency Medicine (EM). Being able to seamlessly and quickly move between tasks is a necessary skill to function in the Emergency Department (ED). The controlled chaos and many moving parts can be overwhelming to new learners in the department and takes dedicated time and experience to overcome. Along with learning the necessary medical knowledge, efficiency expertise is crucial to becoming a high-performing emergency physician. Unfortunately, there is minimal formal training on how to maximize efficiency skills, leading many new EM learners (e.g. medical students and junior residents) having to troubleshoot and create these skills for themselves.

ED Efficiency Themes

Research and anecdotal tips on being an efficient healthcare provider are sprinkled throughout the literature, but there are no established efficiency guidelines or consensus recommendations. Parsing through all available smattering of information in the literature, we identified 3 distinct “themes”:

Efficiency in workflow practices: This means learning skills that maximize a practitioner’s ability to see more patients throughout the shift. These skills work to help providers navigate patients quickly through the department, maintaining constant flow and maximizing resource utilization. By improving one’s workflow practices, tasks can be completed quickly and more patient’s can be seen overall.

Anticipating roadblocks: Situational awareness of potential hurdles allows providers to more easily find workarounds to keep patients on a forward path. Understanding the intricacies of the health system and the functionality of a hospital allows for better anticipation and planning for future impedances to patient care and progress toward disposition.

Effective team communication: Communication is an integral part of being an EM physician. By improving communication and learning to effectively work in a team, a provider can improve their overall efficiency in the department and can decrease provider mental burden.

The ALiEMU 3-Course Series

As educators, we believe all skills can be taught. This includes efficiency skills. After distilling the available efficiency literature, we designed 3 courses, based on the above themes to best teach efficiency to new EM learners.

ED Efficiency ALiEMU badges emergency department

Our FREE curriculum uses the ALiEMU platform to simulate real-world scenarios, integrating the lessons in an interactive and fun way. Learners will discover strategies to optimize their time in the ED and begin their journey toward optimal efficiency.

Examine how your ideas of efficiency fit with the strategies. These concepts may be new, or may already be a part of your EM practice. While operations vary for hospitals and EDs, the content taken as a whole represents the best practices found in the literature. These 3 themes should begin and guide your journey toward efficiency mastery.

ALiEMU: Improving Your ED Efficiency Courses

What are some of YOUR best tips for efficiency on shift? Contact us on Twitter (Dr. Guy Carmelli @GuyCarmelli) with any suggestions or feedback.

By Eric Blazar, MD|2021-12-16T14:34:48-08:00Dec 17, 2021|Academic, Life, Medical Education, Medical Student|

Medical professionals are busy people and exist in a constant state of “being busy.” How do we resolve chronic “busy-ness”? How do we manage our time effectively? In her recent talk at the CORD Academic Assembly 2020, Dr. Christina Shenvi, EM Physician and Associate Residency Director at UNC, provided 5 key actions to help us be productive, complete our work effectively, and strive for work-life balance. Dr. Shenvi recorded her lecture again to be shared with the ALiEM Faculty Incubator. This series of posts breaks down her talk into 3 sections in order to summarize her key points and to help us “Banish Busy” from our lives. This third post will address how to take control of our time.

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By Eric Blazar, MD|2020-07-10T10:48:16-07:00Jul 17, 2020|Life, Professional Development|

Medical professionals are busy people and exist in a constant state of “being busy.” How do we resolve chronic “busy-ness”? How do we manage our time effectively? In her recent talk at the CORD Academic Assembly 2020, Dr. Christina Shenvi, EM Physician and Associate Residency Director at UNC, provided 5 key actions to help us be productive, complete our work effectively, and strive for work-life balance. Dr. Shenvi recorded her lecture again to be shared with the ALiEM Faculty Incubator. This series of posts breaks down her talk into 3 sections in order to summarize her key points and to help us “Banish Busy” from our lives. This second post will discuss seven ways to avoid self-sabotage.

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By Eric Blazar, MD|2020-08-25T18:03:30-07:00Jul 3, 2020|Life, Professional Development|

Medical professionals are busy people and exist in a constant state of “being busy.” How do we resolve chronic “busy-ness”? How do we manage our time effectively? In her recent talk at the CORD Academic Assembly 2020, Dr. Christina Shenvi, EM Physician and Associate Residency Director at UNC, provided 5 key actions to help us be productive, complete our work effectively, and strive for work-life balance. Dr. Shenvi recorded her lecture again to be shared with the ALiEM Faculty Incubator. This series of posts breaks down her talk into 3 sections in order to summarize her key points and to help us “Banish Busy” from our lives. This first post will address the importance of value-based scheduling and how to avoid self-sabotage.

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By Eric Blazar, MD|2020-08-25T18:02:15-07:00Jun 26, 2020|Life, Professional Development|

Just-in-Time Training for Emergency Medicine Radial Arterial Line Placement

A 63-year-old male presents for acute onset of headache, neck pain, and altered mental status. He has a prior history of hypertension and hyperlipidemia but recently lost his insurance and has been unable to fill his medications. As a well-informed 2nd year resident, you suspect the presence of a ruptured subarachnoid hemorrhage and arrange an expedited trip to the CT scanner. The patient’s blood pressure continues to remain elevated and you initiate an antihypertensive drip. You decide that in order to have accurate titration, you need more reliable data and decide to place a radial arterial line. However, the last two arterial lines you placed did not go according to plan! Before you start the procedure, you decide to review the procedure and some common pitfalls in placing radial arterial lines. You remember your attendings telling you during prior attempts to do things a certain way and you want to incorporate these in your practice.