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Whether it’s a routine blood pressure check during a walk-in visit or a referral to a specialist after noticing unusual...
Understanding Urgent Care and When to Use It
Urgent care centers are open 24/7 and diagnose and treat a range of acute medical conditions, such as minor fractures, sprains, and burns. They are ideal for unexpected illnesses and injuries, making them a vital link in the healthcare chain, especially for busy families and individuals without primary care.
Urgent care centers provide immediate, walk-in medical attention for minor injuries or illnesses outside regular doctor's office hours. They are designed to handle urgent care needs without the resources of an emergency room, such as persistent sore throats or sudden earaches. Most communities offer multiple locations, and a quick search for urgent care near me can help you identify a clinic that is not only convenient but also a key resource for your family’s ongoing health needs.
Photo by Gustavo Fring[/caption]
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Non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) services are an essential part of the healthcare system. They address the transportation needs of individuals who require assistance when traveling to medical appointments, treatments, or other healthcare facilities. These services cater to a wide range of patients, including those with disabilities, chronic illnesses, or mobility challenges, as well as individuals who lack access to personal or public transportation.
However, since NEMT services operate in a complex and dynamic environment, they often require juggling multiple demands simultaneously. They must also manage vehicle fleets, comply with strict healthcare and transportation regulations, and ensure patient safety and satisfaction. On top of these challenges, rising costs and the need for modern technology can further complicate operations. Fortunately, there are numerous ways to overcome these obstacles.
In this article, we’ll delve into the challenges that NEMT providers face daily and highlight the innovative strategies they employ to overcome these obstacles.
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When faced with a medical emergency, the decisions made in the first few moments can be the difference between life and death. Whether you're responding to an accident, a sudden illness, or a worsening medical condition, having a clear understanding of how to act can save lives and reduce long-term complications. This guide offers essential steps and considerations for effective decision-making during a medical emergency.
Step 1: Assess the Situation
The first step is to quickly but calmly assess what is happening. Is the person conscious? Are they breathing? Is there any visible bleeding, signs of trauma, or indicators of a heart attack or stroke? Situational awareness is key. Do not panic—take a few deep breaths and focus on what needs to be done.
In many emergencies, calling for help is your top priority. If the person is unresponsive, not breathing, or experiencing symptoms like chest pain, severe bleeding, or sudden confusion, call emergency services immediately. When speaking with the dispatcher, provide clear and concise information about your location, the person’s condition, and any known medical history.
Photo by Mikhail Nilov[/caption]
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Emergency rooms (ERs) are critical in providing lifesaving care to people who need urgent medical attention.
However, due to the fast-paced environment and high-pressure situations, medical errors can sometimes happen.
While ER staff work hard to deliver the best care, it's important to be aware of common mistakes that can occur. Here are five medical errors that may happen in an emergency room.
If you or a loved one has been affected by an ER error, it might be helpful to consult with emergency room error attorneys who can guide you through the legal process.
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First aid kits, bandages, antiseptics, pain relievers, prescription medications, and personal protective equipment (PPE) are the most essential medical supplies. These items account for over 80% of basic medical needs in emergency and routine situations.
While this list covers the basics, it's important to keep reading because the specific medical supplies you need can vary significantly based on your situation – whether you're stocking a home first aid kit, preparing for a natural disaster, or equipping a medical facility. Understanding these scenarios will help you make better-informed decisions about which supplies to prioritize.
Photo by Yogendra Singh on Unsplash[/caption]
You'll unlikely need medical attention when you get a small paper cut or bruise, but exceptions can occur even with minor injuries. Sometimes, cuts require stitches or professional cleaning. Germs or bacteria can also enter a seemingly small cut, leading to a more extensive infection. It can be difficult to tell at times when to seek professional medical care when you get hurt. There are some telltale signs from your body indicate whether you should head to the hospital or urgent care. This list is not all-inclusive, but a guide to some of the more common injuries.
Remember if you are unsure about the seriousness of an injury, it is better to seek medical care than wait.
Dr. Hidde ten Berg[/caption]
Dr. Hidde ten Berg
Department Emergency Medicine and
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Dr. Steef Kurstjens[/caption]
Dr. Steef Kurstjens
Department of Clinical cChemistry and Haematology
Jeroen Bosch Hospital, 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: At this moment we are still in the exploratory phase, and therefore, there is no widespread or routine usage of ChatGPT in Emergency Medicine. That said, there are instances where individual physicians have used ChatGPT for specific purposes. These may include facilitating bureaucratic tasks that can often be time-consuming, aiding in writing e-mails or texts, and serving as a brainstorming tool when dealing with complex medical cases and questions. Though not yet a standardized practice, these isolated examples demonstrate a growing interest for the potential application of this novel technology.
Dr. Newman-Toker[/caption]
David E. Newman-Toker, MD PhD (he/him)
Professor of Neurology, Ophthalmology, & Otolaryngology
David Robinson Professor of Vestibular Neurology
Director, Division of Neuro-Visual & Vestibular Disorders
Director, Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence
Johns Hopkins Medicine
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Diagnostic errors are believed to be a major public health issue, but valid, quantitative estimates of harm are lacking. In 2015, the National Academy of Medicine stated in their report Improving Diagnosis in Healthcare that improving diagnosis was a “moral, professional, and public health imperative” yet also noted that “the available research [is] not adequate to extrapolate a specific estimate or range of the incidence of diagnostic errors in clinical practice today.” We sought a scientifically robust answer to the question of how many patients in the US suffer serious harms as a result of medical misdiagnosis.
Ridge Maxson[/caption]
Ridge Maxson
M.D. Candidate, Class of 2024
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Dog walking is an increasingly popular mode of physical activity for adults in the US, but its injury burden and associated risk factors are not fully understood. This study found that the 3 most common injuries sustained by adult dog walkers in the US were finger fracture, TBI, and shoulder sprain or strain. Dog walking-related injuries sent approximately 423,000 adults to US EDs between 2001 and 2020, with an annual average of more than 21,000 visits. During that 20-year period, the estimated annual injury incidence increased by more than 4-fold. Among injured dog walkers, older adults and women were particularly vulnerable to serious injury, such as fracture and TBI.
Dr. Staples[/caption]
John A. Staples, MD, FRCPC, MPH
Academic General Internist
Vancouver General Hospital
Clinical Assistant Professor at UBC
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: As a hospital-based general internist, I often see patients in the emergency department after an episode of syncope. Syncope is a medical term for suddenly losing consciousness (the public generally knows this as “fainting”). As you can imagine, fainting out of the blue can be very unnerving. Patients and clinicians worry that it may happen again and wonder whether it’s safe to drive. The first time I was asked this question, I remember scouring the research literature for an answer and not finding any robust evidence to guide my advice to patients.
Dr. Budnitz[/caption]
Dr. Daniel S. Budnitz MD MPH CAPT, USPHS
Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion
Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Medication Safety Program
Atlanta, Georgia
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Medications are generally safe when used as prescribed or as directed on the label, but there can be risks in taking any medication. Adverse drug events are harms resulting from the use of medication.
The risk of adverse drug events is highest among older adults and very young children. Older adults have higher risks because they typically take more medications and are more likely to have underlying medical conditions. Very young children have higher risks because they often find and ingest medications meant for others.
Previous studies of medication safety have focused on harm from medications when taken for therapeutic reasons. Separate studies have focused on harm from specific types of non-therapeutic use (taking medications for recreational use or self-harm). This study examined the number of emergency department (ED) visits that resulted when people who took medications for any reason – as directed by a clinician or for other reasons, including recreational use or intentional self-harm.
Dr. Tolliver[/caption]
Destiny Tolliver, MD
National Clinician Scholars Program
Yale University School of Medicine
New Haven, CT 06510-8088
Katherine Nash MD, MHS
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Columbia University Irving Medical Center
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: This study was motivated by work from our colleagues in the adult Emergency Medicine world. Earlier this year Dr. Ambrose Wong and colleagues published work describing racial disparities in the physical restraint of adults in the ED. This prompted our group to consider whether these disparities were also present for children.
Dr. Katsoulis[/caption]
Michalis Katsoulis PhD
Immediate PostDoctoral BHF fellow
Institute of Health Informatics
Senior Research Fellow, UCL
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: In the early stage of the pandemic, we observed a decline in patient visits to Emergency Departments (ED), including those for cardiac diseases. This decline may have been due to fear of coronavirus infection when attending hospital, public reluctance to overload National Health Service facilities, or difficulty accessing care.
In our study, we tried to estimate the impact of reduced ED visits on cardiac mortality in England. We used data from ED visits from the Public Health England Emergency Department Syndromic Surveillance System (EDSSS). For cardiovascular disease outcomes, we obtained mortality counts for cardiac disease from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) for England.
Dr. Love you to the moon and back![/caption]
Susan Lu PhD
Gerald Lyles Rising Star Associate Professor of Management
Krannert School of Management
Purdue University
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: We started this project in 2016. Overcrowding in emergency rooms (ERs) is a common yet nagging problem. It not only is costly for hospitals but also compromises care quality and patient experience. Hence, finding effective ways to improve ER care delivery is of great importance. Meanwhile, the advancement of healthcare technologies including electronic medical records, online doctor ratings and 4G mobile network motivates us to think about the impact of telemedicine on ER operations in the near future. 
Dr. Spitzer[/caption]
Sarabeth Spitzer, MD
Co-Chair of Board, Scrubs Addressing the Firearm Epidemic (SAFE)
Department of Surgery, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Firearm injury is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States, resulting in almost 40,000 deaths annually in the United States, but very little is known about the epidemiology of nonfatal firearm injuries. Nonfatal firearm injuries can have significant long-term morbidity and are associated with significant cost. We found that there were over 81,000 nonfatal firearm injuries in California over the study period. Over the period, there was a decrease in nonfatal firearm injuries by 38.1%, driven primarily by a decrease in assault injuries. 
Sriman Gaddam[/caption]
Sriman Gaddam
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78705
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: The quality of care that patients receive from the US healthcare system continues to be influenced by socioeconomic status (SES). Given that cardiac arrest is one of the most common causes of death in the US and that the prehospital setting has an especially high mortality for cardiac arrest, we wanted to determine if the socioeconomic disparities found in the overall US healthcare system continued into the prehospital cardiac arrest setting.
MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings?
Response: We found that socioeconomic disparities were present in the prehospital cardiac arrest setting. As the SES of a patient declines, so does the patient's likelihood of achieving return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC). Between the most and least wealthy patients, there was nearly a 13% difference in the probability of achieving ROSC. However, we recognized that not all patients who achieve ROSC are equal as patients can have significantly different neurological functioning depending on the length of time spent in cardiac arrest. Consequently, this paper analyzed cardiac arrest outcomes not only through the occurrence of ROSC but also through the duration of time spent in cardiac arrest. In line with the socioeconomic disparities found in ROSC occurrence, it was found that as a patient's SES declines, the duration of time spent in cardiac arrest before ROSC is achieved increases. This indicates that patients with a low SES are both more likely to not achieve ROSC and if ROSC is achieved more likely to have neurological impairment due to longer time spent in cardiac arrest compared to patients with a high SES.
Dr. Vandrey[/caption]
Ryan Vandrey, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Baltimore, MD 21224
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: The background for this study is that 33 states in the U.S. have legalized medicinal cannabis use and millions of people are using cannabis for therapeutic purposes, but we have very little data on the broad health impacts of medicinal cannabis use.
We surveyed medicinal cannabis users and non-using controls who had a variety of health problems and found that the cannabis users reported better health, quality of life, and less healthcare utilization compared with controls. Because we worried about group characteristics accounting for the differences observed, we then did an analysis of people who switched groups over time (e.g. non-users who later initiated cannabis use or cannabis users who later quit) and found the same differences emerged in the same individuals over time. Important to note here is that not all individuals who used cannabis benefited from it and that most participants were using high CBD varieties of cannabis in conjunction with more traditional treatments.
Dr. Kansagra[/caption]
Akash Kansagra, MD, MS
Assistant Professor of Radiology
Neurological Surgery, and Neurology
Director, Endovascular Surgical Neuroradiology
Co-Director, Stroke and Cerebrovascular Center
Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Hospital
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Over the past five years, medicine has made enormous strides in stroke treatment. The effectiveness of these therapies has been absolutely astounding, and our ability to get patients to hospitals that can provide this life-saving care has also improved dramatically.
Dr. Vigen[/caption]
Rebecca Vigen, MD, MSCS
Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine
UT Southwestern
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Emergency department overcrowding is an urgent health priority and chest pain is a common reason for emergency department visits. We developed a new protocol that uses high sensitivity cardiac troponin testing with a risk assessment tool that guides decisions on discharge and stress testing for patients presenting with chest pain. The protocol allows us to rule out heart attacks more quickly than the protocols utilizing an older troponin assay.
Collin Tebo BA
Georgetown University School of Medicine
Washington, DC
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: The growing cost of pharmaceuticals is an issue of increasing concern in the United States where a large portion of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product is health care spending. During the past decade, visits to Emergency Departments (EDs) have increased considerably. Pharmaceutical drugs are utilized in the care of most patients who visit the ED therefore, rising drug prices are a concern for emergency medicine physicians, administrators, and patients throughout the US.
Casey Balio[/caption]
Casey P. Balio, BA
Department of Health Policy and Management
Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health
Indianapolis, IN
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: There are numerous studies that estimate the prevalence of various opioid-related outcomes including emergency department (ED) encounters, hospitalizations, and overdoses as well as risk factors for these. However, there is limited evidence about repeated opioid-related encounters.
This study uses health information exchange (HIE) data for four hospital systems in the state of Indiana from 2012-2017 to identify individual, prescription, encounter, and community characteristics that may be associated with having repeat opioid-related encounters.
Simon Borghs[/caption]
Simon Borghs MSc
RWE Strategy Lead of Neurology
UCB: Union Chimique Belge
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Epilepsy is an episodic disease and so is associated with a more or less unpredictable occurrence of health care encounters. These encounters are costly and so reducing them, or their unpredictability, could be cost saving.
The objective was to assess one half of this equation, that is the actual cost of those encounters to insurers. This could prompt insurers to consider addressing possible interventions in epilepsy to reduce the number of encounters
Laura Burke, MD, MPH
Department of Emergency Medicine
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Boston, MA 02215
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: There has been a lot of attention to the growing intensity and costs of emergency care, but relatively little study of how outcomes have changed in recent years for patients using the ED. We examined 30-day mortality rates for traditional Medicare beneficiaries age 65 and older using the emergency department (ED) from 2009-2016 and also examined how their rates of hospitalization have changed over time.
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