Online service holds your spot at hospital

From AJC.com:
Have you ever made an online reservation at your favorite restaurant? What if you could do the same for an emergency room visit?
Tyler Kiley, a 23-year-old Powder Springs entrepreneur, has applied a practice used by the restaurant industry as a remedy to long waits at hospitals. Two years ago, Kiley launched InQuickER, an online [...]

Texting the Emergency Room

From WALB.com
ALBANY, GA – Often those folks who can’t afford to go to a doctor’s office end up in the ER.
That’s leading to long waits in many hospitals, but one Albany hospital is working to reduce wait times.
Palmyra Medical Center has a new program to let you know how long you’ll wait, before you even arrive [...]

Caught On Tape: Scuffle Between Paramedic And Trooper

From Digital Triad:
Paden, OK — A scuffle between first responders in Oklahoma is caught on tape.
Highway Patrol troopers and a paramedic nearly come to blows while a patient waits to be taken to the hospital. The encounter was caught on a cell phone came by Kenyada Davis, the son of the patient in the ambulance.
The [...]

Gender disparities seen in EMS care for chest pain

From Reuters Health:
Women with chest pain are less likely than their male counterparts to receive aspirin and other recommended therapies by emergency medical service (EMS) personnel, according to study findings presented Friday at the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s annual conference in New Orleans.
“Women with heart attacks have higher death rates than men, so these [...]

Videoconferencing can increase patient access to stroke specialists; immediate, thorough testing needed after “warning” strokes

From The American Heart Association:
High-quality videoconferencing can increase patient access to stroke specialists, especially in rural or other underserved areas; and a transient ischemic attack (TIA), once known as a “mini” or “warning” stroke, should be treated with the same urgency as a full-blown stroke, according to two separate scientific statements and a policy statement [...]

Stroke Group Expands Time for Clot-Busting Drugs

From JEMS:
A change to stroke treatment guidelines is expanding the time that some patients can get clot-busting drugs. Current recommendations limit the use of the medicine to within three hours after the start of stroke symptoms. That treatment window is now being lengthened to 4 1/2 hours for some patients.
But the committee that made [...]

The Effect of Family Presence on the Efficiency of Pediatric Trauma Resuscitations

From the Annals of Emergency Medicine, via Science Direct:

Study objective
Family presence has broad professional organizational support and is gaining acceptance. We seek to determine whether family presence prolonged pediatric trauma team resuscitations as measured by time from emergency department arrival to computed tomographic (CT) scan, and to resuscitation completion.
Methods
A prospective trial offered families of pediatric [...]

Emergency nurse practitioners and doctors consulting with patients in an emergency department: a comparison of communication skills and satisfaction

From Emergency Medicine Journal:
Background: Emergency nurse practitioners (ENPs) play an increasingly important role in UK emergency departments (EDs), but there is limited evidence about how this affects patient care and outcome. A study was undertaken to compare the content of, and satisfaction with, consultations made with patients presenting with problems of low acuity to an [...]

Efficacy and Safety of Tissue Plasminogen Activator 3- to 4.5-Hours After Acute Ischemic Stroke. A Metaanalysis

From Stroke:
Background and Purpose—The Third European Cooperative Acute Stroke Study (ECASS-3) demonstrated a benefit of treatment with intravenous tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) for acute stroke in the 3- to 4.5-hour time-window. Prior studies, however, have failed to demonstrate a significant benefit of tPA for patients treated beyond 3 hours. The purpose of this study was [...]

What are parents’ rights regarding a child’s medical treatment?

From the CNN Empowered Patient series:
Even when a child is in imminent danger of dying, parents have the latitude to reject potentially life-saving treatments if they’re experimental, or if the parents can show an alternative treatment would work just as well, says Art Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Children [...]