Paul I. Musey, M.D., MSc, explains the challenges of making informed decisions in emergency care with limited patient history.
Transcript:
Providing emergency care is complicated. We don’t have a longitudinal relationship with the majority of patients that come into the emergency department. We’re relying on them to tell us about not only what is going on at this moment but providing us a little bit of a snapshot of their life overall. It requires us, when medical records are available, to be able to go back and take a look at that. It requires sometimes getting ancillary information — whether it’s from the emergency medicine services personnel that brought the patient in or speaking with family. But we’re doing that in a short period of time in order to try and make a decision about the next thing that we need to do to make sure that we’re ruling out threats to life and limb and that for the patients that we do send home, that they’re going to be safe until their next touchpoint with the healthcare system. That can be a stressful thing for the clinician because you’re trying to do the right thing for the patient. Nobody wants to have a patient go out and have a bad outcome. It’s trying to equate those outcomes that we as clinicians feel to be important with patient-reported outcomes, which is a higher bar.
