BACKGROUND Relatively few studies have been conducted of the association between air pollution and emergency department (ED) visits, and most of these have been based on a small number of visits, for a limited number of health conditions and pollutants, and only daily measures of exposure and response. METHODS A time-series analysis was conducted on nearly 400,000 ED visits to 14 hospitals in...

We attempted to address deficiencies in administrative health service data during a study of cardiorespiratory emergency department visits. From 1994-1996, we obtained data on 9,264 visits and conducted 1,772 follow-up interviews. The median interval between symptoms and visit ranged from 0.8 days (95% CI 0-1.7) for cardiac conditions to 4.0 days for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)...

STUDY OBJECTIVES Accurate prediction of the effect of atmospheric changes, including pollutants, on emergency department (ED) visits for respiratory symptoms would be useful, but has proven difficult. The main difficulty is the limitation of the classical linear models and logistic regression with multiple variables to handle the multifactorial effect. DESIGN AND SETTING To predict ED visits,...

Patients with pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and heart failure make frequent visits to the emergency department. Heart failure alone is the reason for more than 1 million emergency department visits annually in the United States. This article describes strategies home care clinicians can use to prevent unnecessary emergency department visits for patients with pneumonia...

OBJECTIVE To examine national patterns in the emergency department assessment and treatment during visits by young people, aged 7 to 24 years, who are seen following an episode of deliberate self-harm. METHOD An analysis was conducted of a nationally representative sample of hospital emergency department visits from the 1997-2002 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey focusing on vi...

OBJECTIVE To assess associations between secure patient-clinician email use and clinical services utilisation over time. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study between July 2010 and December 2013. Controlling for a utilisation surge around first secure email use, we analysed difference of differences between propensity score-matched groups of secure patient-clinician email users and non-users for ...

With the explosive growth and consequent usage of the Internet as a medium to offer new services with increased value, it became possible to develop Internet Voting Systems. So far, several have been proposed but few have been implemented. REVS is an Internet Voting System based on blind signatures designed to tackle some of the real-world problems presented by other systems. The main contribut...

BACKGROUND The Beers criteria identify inappropriate use of medications in older adults. The number of and risk for adverse events from these medications are unknown. OBJECTIVE To estimate the number of and risk for emergency department visits for adverse events involving Beers criteria medications compared with other medications. DESIGN Nationally representative, public health surveillance...