Medpedia: Online Encyclopedia of Medicine

From Medgadget:

A group of American medical schools is working on a project to essentially collect and organize all medical knowledge in a Wikipedia-like form. Access to MedPedia will be available to all, but editing rights will be limited to M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s in relevant fields of research. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Berkeley will kick off the site with initial content and work with the rest of the medical community to make it comprehensive. With that in mind, the project organizers are calling on all M.D’s and Ph.D’s to register to become editors of what they believe will be the largest and most complete encyclopedia of medicine in history.

Dropping the Baton: A Qualitative Analysis of Failures During the Transition From Emergency Department to Inpatient Care

From the Annals of Emergency Medicine:

The transfer of a patient from the ED to internal medicine can be associated with adverse events. Specific vulnerable areas include communication, environment, workload, information technology, patient flow, and assignment of responsibility. Systems-based interventions could ameliorate many of these and potentially improve patient safety.

Staff Finds Rx for Hospital Via Board Game Strategy

Associated Press Stacom, Don

“Friday Night at the ER” provided department heads, managers and staff with an in-depth look at staffing levels, revenues and hospital administration after simulating a 24-hour period at Bristol Hospital in Connecticut. The program is based on a board game and divided staff into groups of four charged with managing growing numbers of patients and shortages of beds and nurses. The number of patients in the ER waiting room continued to increase during the game, and teams managing the operating room, critical care unit, medical surgical floor and the ER discovered that when they worked together the number of patients in the waiting room declined.

Is Your Patient Throughput Sending Out an SOS?

Healthcare Financial Management Vol. 62, No. 7, P. 86; McLarty, Jim; Jeffers, Lori

The emergency department (ED) is used to gauge a hospital’s operational health and reputation and generally provides a substantial amount of revenue. However, inadequate patient throughput–not just increased demand–can lead to overcrowding in the ED and often is characterized by longer lengths of stay in the ED, higher rates of patients leaving before being seen, longer boarding periods in the ED and increased patient diversions to other beds. Even small, inexpensive improvements, such as expanding transport personnel at times when admission and discharge tend to be high, can be a big help; but regardless of the steps hospitals take, a culture change, staff training in new processes, front-line managers’ buy-in and continual monitoring are required.

Vultures eye Wis. hospital patients

From UPI.com

Patients at a Milwaukee-area hospital say the last thing they want to see while facing surgery are vultures perched outside their windows. 

Yet, that’s the view from some patient’s rooms at the Orthopedic Hospital of Wisconsin in Glendale, Wis., the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Wednesday. It said patients about to go under the knife can watch up to six turkey vultures sitting on ledges of the three-story building.