Share your tips: Managing digital information overload

In this digital age, it is somewhat assumed that you know how to manage all the digital information coming at you in the forms of email, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds. Even if you only partake in email as your primary communication platform, information still can be quite overwhelming as a trainee or practicing medical provider. At a the annual Bay Area EM residency conference last week, Dr. Charlotte Wills (Highland), Dr. Rebecca Smith-Coggins (Stanford) and I were invited by Dr. Esther Chen (UCSF-SFGH) to share some our personal insights and advice on a panel. We quickly realized that this is indeed a hot topic which often gets subsumed under the larger umbrella of “Wellness”.

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By Michelle Lin, MD|2026-06-16T16:04:08-07:00Sep 1, 2013|Social Media & Tech|

PV Card: Brugada Criteria for SVT with Aberrancy vs Ventricular Tachycardia

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Due to the overwhelming popularity of Dr. Salim Rezaie‘s recent post discussing the Brugada criteria for SVT with aberrancy vs VT, Dr. Jason West (@JWestEM, an EM resident from Jacobi/Montefiore) kindly helped to co-author and package this information into a PV card for quick reference. To use this sequential, four-question approach, if at any time you answer YES to the question, it is ventricular tachycardia.

PV Card: SVT vs VT – Brugada Criteria

Adapted from [1]
Go to ALiEM (PV) Cards for more resources.

Reference

Brugada P, Brugada J, Mont L, Smeets J, Andries E. A new approach to the differential diagnosis of a regular tachycardia with a wide QRS complex. Circulation. 1991;83(5):1649-1659. [PubMed]

By Michelle Lin, MD|2021-10-06T19:47:10-07:00Aug 27, 2013|ALiEM Cards, Cardiovascular, ECG, Expert Peer Reviewed (Clinical)|

New Quality Improvement Series: Be a detective to avoid errors

When you attend Morbidity & Mortality or Quality Improvement (QI) Conferences, the cases presented often have teaching points, which revolve around potentially avoidable errors. Subtle and not-too-subtle clues often reveal themselves along the way, which could have been detected sooner. This ALiEM QI Series, hosted by Dr. Steven Polevoi (UCSF EM Medical and QI Director), was created to help you become a better detective in finding these clues early in the patient’s course.

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

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By Michelle Lin, MD|2017-03-05T14:14:14-08:00Aug 26, 2013|Emergency Medicine|

Patwari Academy videos: EBM Treatment Studies (part 2)

Dr. Rahul Patwari continues with the fourth and fifth videos in this series on Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) and Treatment Studies (see first three videos). These two videos are about the concept of Confidence Intervals and Patient Applicability. The second video below makes great points about whether a published study is applicable to YOUR patient. Don’t fall into common traps.

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By Michelle Lin, MD|2019-01-28T21:56:37-08:00Aug 25, 2013|Patwari Videos|

Patwari Academy videos: EBM Treatment Studies

Dr. Rahul Patwari reviews evidence-based medicine (EBM) concepts specifically regarding treatment studies, as guided by the JAMA Users Guide to the Medical Literature manual. In these first three videos, Rahul provides a brief introduction to the concept of treatment studies and then discusses (1) how to assess whether the results are valid and (2) calculating the risks/benefits of treatment based on the IST-3 trial?

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By Michelle Lin, MD|2019-01-28T21:56:47-08:00Aug 18, 2013|Patwari Videos|

Hero spotlight: Dr.Todd Raine

There are incredible people doing incredibly inspiring work in Emergency Medicine. I wanted to restart the hero series, which had fallen off the radar a few years ago, featuring amazing people in our specialty. Today’s hero spotlight is on Dr. Todd Raine (@RaineDoc). He is a Staff Physician and IT Coordinator at the Providence Healthcare Department of EM and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Department of EM. Despite these notable accomplishments, he is famous in the social media world for his innovative creation of a Google-based EM search engine GoogleFOAM.com, which many of us use to perform social media site searches online in the field of EM. His search engine is a “unified search of all FOAM sources on the Web.”

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By Michelle Lin, MD|2026-06-16T16:03:59-07:00Aug 15, 2013|Medical Education, Social Media & Tech|

Patwari Academy videos: Spider and Hymenoptera bites

These two videos continue on the theme of envenomations. Watch these great videos on the consequences and management of bites by spiders and Hymenoptera species (bees, wasps, ants). Hymenoptera bites can cause all sorts of complications, but one of the most worrisome includes anaphylaxis, which is also reviewed in the video.

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By Michelle Lin, MD|2019-01-28T21:56:58-08:00Aug 11, 2013|Environmental, Patwari Videos|

About Michelle Lin, MD

PV Card: SVT vs VT – Brugada Criteria

Reference