To understand trends in emergency medicine and interprofessional roles in delivering this care, we analyzed a 10-year period (1995-2004) by provider, patient characteristics, and diagnoses. The focus was on how doctors, physician assistants (PAs) and nurse practitioners (NPs) share emergency medicine visits. The National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey of over 1 billion "weighted" emerg...

There are many protocols proposed for electronic voting, but only a few of them have prototypes implemented. Usually the prototypes are focused in the characteristics of the protocol and do not handle properly some real world issues, such as fault tolerance. This paper presents REVS, a robust electronic voting system designed for distributed and faulty environments, namely the Internet. The goa...

BACKGROUND Poisoning continues to be an important public health problem in the US. In 1995, 2 million human poison exposures were reported to all poison centers in the US. Hospital emergency department data may be used to examine the most critical nonfatal poisoning exposures. METHODS Data from the 1993-1996 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, which is a national probability sam...

BACKGROUND Health care utilization and costs among US veterans with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) were compared with those in veterans without COPD. METHODS A cohort of veterans with COPD was matched for age, sex, race, and index fiscal year to a cohort of veterans without COPD (controls) using data from the Veterans Integrated Service Network (VISN) 16 from 10/1/1997 to 9/30/2...

Americans made 1.17 billion visits to ambulatory clinics and emergency departments in 2005. Acute respiratory infections (i.e., nonspecific upper respiratory infections, otitis media, sinusitis, phar-yngitis, bronchitis, influenza, and pneumonia) account for 11% of this total (130 million visits). This makes acute respiratory infections the most common symptomatic reason for seeking medical car...

Introduction Acute severe asthma is one of the most common causes of visits to hospital emergency departments worldwide and accounts for the greater part of the economic and healthcare burden of the disease.1 Failure to appreciate the severity, inadequate emergency treatment, and delay in referral may lead to increased mortality and morbidity.2 Asthma is the most common respiratory emergency in...

BACKGROUND The recent implementation of electronic medical record systems allows for the development of systems to track common illness across a defined community. With the threats of bioterrorism and pandemic illness, syndromic surveillance methodologies have become an important area of study. There has been limited study of the application of syndromic surveillance techniques to communities f...

BACKGROUND The need to improve influenza vaccination delivery in our community became painfully clear during the winter of 1997-1998 when high rates of respiratory illness led to congestion in the emergency department and a critical shortage of hospital beds. In response, the local hospital and the Department of Health launched a collaborative program to increase influenza vaccine coverage in t...