Urgent Matters

Dr. Christopher Beach sits down to talk with Dr. Jesse Pines about his new program "Safer Admit". With Dr. Beach's new program, hospital physicians and emergency department staff can begin working to bridge the challenges of effective communication during a patient's hospital admission. This will reduce errors, improve efficiency, and increase patient satisfaction. 

Urgent Matters is a portal for innovative strategies, creating a central resource for hospital staff to discover field-tested initiatives they can tailor to their own healthcare organization. We are currently housed in The George Washington University Office for Clinical Practice Innovation. With quarterly e-newsletters, webinars, and a searchable toolkit, Urgent Matters offers its subscribers information on the latest best practices and hot topics in emergency care. Visit our website at www.urgentmatters.org for more information and to join the mailing list. 

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This week on Urgent Matters, Dr. Jesse Pines is joined by Dev Culver and Eric Widen to discuss how Maine is reducing emergency department readmissions, and providing better care for patients. 

Dev Culver is the President and CEO of HealthInfoNet, which runs the state health information exchange in Maine. He has teamed up with Eric Widen, the President of HBI Solutions, to use software to analyze the data already in the exchange and determine the likelihood that a patient will be hospitalized soon. This gives clinicians and case managers a new tool for identifying patients that need more help. 

Urgent Matters is housed in The George Washington University's Office for Clinical Practice Innovation. For more information or to sign up for our newsletters, visit www.urgentmatters.org. 

If you've enjoyed the Urgent Matters podcast series, check out "Clinical Practice Innovation" - also available for free on iTunes and other podcast apps.

Millions of patients every year are released from the emergency department with instructions to get follow-up care with their primary care physician or a specialist. Studies repeatedly show however, that many patients never comply. With so much pressure to keep patients healthy and out of the ED, hospitals need a better solution. Dr Benji Jack of BoardRounds, is here this week to talk to Dr Jesse Pines of Urgent Matters about how his company is helping hospitals get their patients connected to the care and services they need. 

Urgent Matters is a dissemination vehicle for strategies on emergency department patient flow and quality. For more information and resources such as newsletters, webinars, conferences, and issue briefs, visit www.urgentmatters.org 

Dr Jesse Pines is the director of The George Washington University Office for Clinical Practice Innovation, a professor of medicine and health policy, and a practicing emergency physician. 

For more information about BoardRounds or to contact this week's guest, Dr Benji Jack, visit www.boardrounds.com

For most patients, a trip to the emergency room is a stressful and unappealing experience. For LGBT patients, discussing intimate health information and personal details can add an additional layer of discomfort. Dr. Joel Moll and colleagues decided to research whether emergency medicine residents were being prepared to handle these issues. Their results indicated that there needs to be a push for more inclusive medical training in many places, so that the next generation of physicians know how to make their patients more comfortable, and to provide them with the best care possible. 

Joel Moll, MD serves as the emergency medicine residency program director at Virginia Commonwealth University. This interview was conducted by Jesse Pines, MD who is the director of The George Washington University Office for Clinical Practice Innovation and a practicing emergency physician. 

Urgent Matters is a dissemination vehicle for strategies on emergency department patient flow and quality. For more of our products, visit www.urgentmatters.org , or text URGENTMATTERS to 22828 to sign up for our quarterly newsletters! 

Want more podcast interviews? Check out "Clinical Practice Innovations" for more interviews with leaders throughout the healthcare industry. 

Introducing clinical decision aid software into a hospital can be a daunting challenge. It can improve care, but also can make doctors miserable. How can clinical decision aids be more effectively integrated into the practices of emergency physicians? In this episode, Dr. Ali Raja of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston discusses with Dr. Jesse Pines creating a system that works with physicians. 

Urgent Matters is a dissemination vehicle for strategies on emergency department patient flow and quality. Check out www.urgentmatters.org for newsletters, webinars, conferences, and searchable collection of strategies for ED improvement. Urgent Matters can also be found on facebook and twitter www.facebook.com/urgentmatters

Jason Grady, the Northeast Georgia Regional STEMI System Coordinator, talks to Dr. Jesse Pines about how they improved their region's STEMI program. Through communication and education, EMS, ED, and Cath Lab improved their coordination, and the use of a surprisingly simple project management software called "SmartSheet" ensured that doctors had the information they wanted at their fingertips.

Urgent Matters is a dissemination vehicle for strategies on emergency (ED) patient flow and quality. For a multidisciplinary audience of emergency care stakeholders, we develop quarterly e-newsletters, educational webinars, a searchable collection of ED improvement tools and strategies, national conferences, and this podcast series. If you're interested in what you hear, let us know on facebook and twitter! @Urgent_Matters  

This week, Dr Pines interviews Dr George Hertner of Memorial Hospital in Colorado about how point-of-care testing has and can change hospitals, what are the benefits and costs of these tools, and where they are most useful. 

Urgent Matters serves as a dissemination vehicle for strategies on emergency department (ED) patient flow and quality. For a multidisciplinary audience of emergency care stakeholders, we develop quarterly e-newsletters, educational webinars, a searchable collection of ED improvement tools and strategies, national conferences, and a podcast series. Urgent Matters serves as a portal for innovative flow strategies, creating a central resource for hospital staff to discover field-tested initiatives that can be tailored to their organization. Visit our website www.urgentmatters.org for more information, and follow us on twitter @urgent_matters 

Dr. Tom Scaletta of Edward Hospital in Naperville IL talks to Dr. Jesse Pines, the director of Urgent Matters, about the development and implementation of an automated system for contacting patients discharged from the emergency department. 

Dr Jesse Pines interviews Dr Thom Mayer of Inova Fairfax Hospital about their "Risk Free ED" program. Through this initiative, the hospital has reduced clinical variation, providing better medical care for patients as well as significantly reducing the hospital's financial risk due to litigation. 

Dr. Jesse Pines interviews Dr. Karen Sepucha of Massachusetts General Hospital's Health Decision Sciences Center about her work studying shared decision making between clinicians and patients and their development of patient decision aids.