Mount Sinai’s new ER has bedside “geriPads”

From MobiHealthNews:

Mount Sinai’s patient satisfaction scores for those in the new ER are “off the scoreboard,” Dr. Andy Jagoda, Mount Sinai’s chairman of emergency medicine told the Times. The facility, which has just eight beds, also offers quieter rooms (no metal curtain rings), non-slip floors, an artificial skylight that turns dark at night, and an iPad at every bed. Dr. Jagoda told the newspaper that the stripped down iPad, which he calls the geriPad, is one of his favorite innovations. The device enables patients to have two-way video conversations with nurses and also offers touch screen buttons to ask for lunch, pain medication, or music.

Mobile Stroke Unit Speeds Time to Treatment

From MedPage Today:

An in-ambulance medical unit offering stroke assessment en route to the hospital can shorten the time from the emergency call to therapy, researchers found.

In a single-center study that was halted when the treated group met prespecified criteria for the primary endpoint, a mobile stroke unit team embedded with emergency medical services (EMS) reduced the time to making a treatment decision by a significant 41 minutes compared with standard care (P<0.0001).

Tool Helps Chest Pain Patients Decide on Tests, Cuts ER Costs

From Newswise (Press Release):

Patients who went to the emergency room with chest pain but were at low risk for a heart attack were less likely to seek more tests after their conditions were explained to them using an educational tool known as a decision aid, a Mayo Clinic study found. The findings are published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, an American Heart Association journal.

Chest pain is the No. 2 reason people seek emergency care at U.S. hospitals. It accounts for about $8 billion in health care costs annually, researchers estimate.

“To avoid missing a diagnosis of heart attack — which could have substantial medical and legal implications — emergency physicians often admit patients to observation units for stress testing, even though patients are at a very low risk for heart attack,” says lead author Erik Hess, M.D., a Mayo Clinic emergency room physician. “This results in false-positive test results, unnecessary additional procedures, exposure to radiation and increased cost.”