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Ambulance Service Called 800 Times By 21 People: EMS Responds With Preventive Strategy

EMS/ED frequent fliers are both a bane and (supposedly) another cost of doing business for EMS systems.  Maybe not.

My city of Fort Worth is trying to do something about it, proactively and correctly (emphasis mine):

MedStar program sends paramedic to homes of some repeat callers before they dial 911 | Fort Wor…
FORT WORTH — Last year, MedStar was called more than 800 times by 21 people.

Those “frequent fliers” weren’t necessarily facing life-threatening emergencies. Some may have needed primary care but didn’t have a regular doctor or transportation. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*

What Happens After You Call 911?

Dr. Jon LaPook takes a trip as a pseudo-patient to Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center’s Emergency Department. See part 1 of the adventure here.


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**This video was originally published at www.cbsdoc.com**

In Case Of Emergency: How To Prepare For The Unexpected

Would you know what to do if you needed an ambulance or if you had to go to an emergency room?  During 2005, an estimated 115 million visits were made to emergency rooms in the United States – up 31 percent from 1995. About 14 percent of patients arrive via ambulance. Emergency rooms across America are overloaded – partly because many of the almost 50 million uninsured use the emergency room as their primary physician (and partly because we tend to focus on treatment of illness rather than prevention – but that’s another blog post).


During the next two segments, I will take you way behind the scenes and give you tips on how to be prepared in case the unexpected happens and you end up on your way to an emergency room.  This week I play the part of a patient with chest pain and take you inside a New York City ambulance with paramedics Ray Cordi and Hanan Cohen.  Next week my colleague, Richard Schlesinger, and I continue your tour inside the emergency room at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, the first time this institution (where I am on staff) has ever allowed such inside access to the media.


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**This blog post was first published at CBSDOC.COM**

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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