Drs. Tyson Pillow, Stacey Poznanski, Robert Tubbs, and I will be teaming up to deliver a Presentation Design Bootcamp talk for medical educators at the 2014 Council for EM Residency Directors (CORD). The session is on April 2, 2014 at 1:30-2:20p in New Orleans, LA. Because it is a short 1-hour intensive workshop, we want to offer participants the opportunity to prepare themselves by reviewing the slide set ahead of time.
Today, the New England Journal of Medicine just released a landmark paper by the ProCESS (Protocolized Care for Early Septic Shock) trial investigators. There has already been much buzz about this on various blogs and websites, including St. Emlyn’s, MedPageToday, and MDAware. I received an email from my colleague Dr. Michael Callaham, who shared some direct comments and pearls from Dr. Donald Yealy, (professor and chair of emergency medicine from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) who was the first author of this writing team. Thank you to Dr. Yealy for allowing me to share your team’s comments with the ALiEM readership.
As educational content, which was traditionally published in the form of textbooks, get repurposed into blog posts, podcasts, and videos, iBooks have been a bit slower to take hold. They can replace print textbooks, if done from a thoughtful design-based approach such as by Drs. Matthew Dawson and Mike Mallin in their Introduction to EM Ultrasound (volume 1 and 2) iBooks. Here’s another iBook entitled “EM Clinical Decision Rules” involving pulmonary embolism (PE) and minor head trauma by Drs. Shannon McNamara, Christine Knettel, and David Wald.
Dr. Ken Milne of The Skeptics Guide to Emergency Medicine series has kindly summarized his 42 podcasts from this year and is releasing the summary [download PDF] as a free holiday gift! He also lists the best podcast picks for the year in his year-end blog post.
As part of a series on Faculty Heroes, I wanted to highlight Dr. Stacey Poznanski (Director of EM Undergraduate Education and Assistant Professor of EM at Wright State University), who has done amazing things in EM. Most recently I had the pleasure of co-presenting at the 2013 International EM Teaching Course with Stacey at our Powerpoint Resuscitation workshop. The following are some of her thoughtful words of wisdom for those interested in EM, education, and academics.
For the ALiEM – Annals of EM global journal club on the article “Emergency Department Computed Tomography Utilization in the United States and Canada”, discuss question number 4 on the topic of reimbursements tied to diagnosis:
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed instituting a new process metric OP 15 “Use of Brain CT in the Emergency Department of Atraumatic Headache.” OP 15 measures the percentage of ED visits for atraumatic headache (ie, ED billing codes for tension, cluster, migraine, and nonspecific headaches) among Medicare beneficiaries who have a brain CT performed on the same day. ED patients who are admitted to the hospital and those whose secondary diagnoses include codes related to subarachnoid hemorrhage, transient cerebral ischemia, and tumor/mass are excluded from the denominator. The public reporting of OP 15 is presently postponed to allow time for refinement of the measure by a technical expert panel. However, if this indicator is fully instituted, would the threat of decreased reimbursement and public reporting of use decrease your ordering of CTs in patients older than 65 years and with atraumatic headaches?
For the ALiEM – Annals of EM global journal club on the article “Emergency Department Computed Tomography Utilization in the United States and Canada”, discuss question number 3 on the topic of malpractice and CT use:
Discuss some of the important differences between the current health care systems and medical malpractice environments in Canada and the United States. How might these differences affect CT use in the emergency department (ED)? How might the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the US affect these differences?