Ambulance-Based Telemedicine

From Emergency Management Blogs:

What do you get when you invest $14 million and 6 years of field tests in an emergency medical services telemedicine system? You get DREAMS^TM– Disaster Relief and Emergency Medical Services – described as the most advanced EMS telemedicine system in the world.  The $14 million came from the U. S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command and the Telemedicine and Technology Research Center (TATRC) through a Congressionally Funded military research project.

Palliative care comes to the ED

From Philly:

When Joseph Morelli’s medical history popped up on her computer screen early one Sunday this month, Meg Greene, a nurse case manager in Bryn Mawr Hospital’s emergency department, immediately recognized that he might benefit from her specialty: palliative care.

Greene is part of a small but growing group of medical providers who say many patients in emergency departments are not appropriate for the all-out rescue medicine these units are designed to deliver. Instead, they are suffering from the pain and inexorable decline of cancer and chronic illness or old age, and may be better served by care aimed at comfort, not cure.

EMTALA Investigation

From Twin Cities:

The Minnesota Department of Health on Tuesday said it had substantiated a complaint of patient “dumping” by Unity Hospital in Fridley.

The hospital could be out of compliance with a federal law that governs treatment of emergency-room patients, the Health Department said, after a patient who sought treatment at Unity’s ER in April was not given a screening examination.

According to the Health Department’s report, released Tuesday, a cabdriver went to the emergency-room triage desk the morning of April 10 and said he had an intoxicated patient in his cab. Two hospital workers at Unity went to the cab, determined the patient should go to a detox unit and called for police transport, the report said.

The report paraphrased a police officer as saying: “The triage nurse indicated to the police officer that the patient was passing out in the waiting room, that they could not have that and that the (emergency room) was too full and they could not take him.”