EMTALA Information Thread

Very cool post on the Student Doctor Network Emergency Medicine Forum by “DocB”:

I recently started working on a previously promised thread about specialty call. Since understanding specialty call requires a basic understanding of the EMTALA law I had planned to link to previously posted information. In the course of searching however I found that while we have had many discussions about EMTALA here on the EM board we didn’t have a purely informational “from the ground up” type of thread.

What follows is my explanation of the basics of EMTALA. Knowing that a lot of folks have better things to do than to slog through this I’m putting some of the useful links at the beginning. Here is the most useful link which is to ACEP’s EMTALA FAQ page. It’s a good read and I highly recommend it. That said remember that they are not the ultimate authority on EMTALA. That’s the government and they don’t really accept that role as we’ll discuss later. ACEP is helping us out in that they are trying to keep up with what EMTALA has been most recently interpreted to mean by the courts and they are able to devote a lot of resources to this end.

Medical care vanishing in rural Wisconsin

From Madison.com:

Hospitals in Edgerton, Friendship, Hillsboro, Osceola, Sparta and Stanley have dropped their nursing homes in recent years.

In Edgerton, Friendship and Shawano, hospitals have given up home health care services.

Mental health units can no longer be found at hospitals in Boscobel and Darlington.

Babies aren’t delivered routinely anymore at hospitals in Durand, Merrill, Park Falls and Sparta.

The facilities are among Wisconsin’s 59 “critical access” hospitals, a federal designation for rural hospitals that brings more money from Medicare, the federal health plan for seniors and the disabled.

Only five states have more of these hospitals.

The program, which started in 1999, has kept many struggling rural hospitals alive, administrators say. But some of the hospitals continue to wrestle with the high cost of delivering medical care to a small number of patients.

Challenges in Rural Medicine: Wisconsin

From Madison.com:

Emergency care is one of many ways in which the health care system can fall short for the 50 million Americans in rural areas. From a shortage of doctors and specialized services to an abundance of patients who are poor, elderly or have little or no insurance, health care in rural areas such as Park Falls can be precarious.

The Wisconsin State Journal, which is undertaking a special reporting project on rural health care this year, found similar hurdles in small towns across the state. From Boscobel and Darlington to Friendship and Merrill, cash-strapped hospitals have dropped important services, following a national trend.