There was a positive correlation with individual physician resource utilization and hospital admission. Testers are admitters.

Did you know that in most states, patients can still vote while hospitalized? Learn more at PatientVoting.com.

From 2008 to 2015, low acuity care in commercially insured patients has dropped 36% in EDs and increased 140% in non-ED settings, dominated by an increase in urgent care but also, less so, by increases in retail clinic and telemedicine utilization.

We can learn a lot from studying how other countries, such as our Canadian neighbors, do healthcare financing.

The higher cost, lower yield tests to consider avoiding for patients ≥60 with syncope were: EEG, head CT, MRA, cardiac stress test, and EP study.

Sepsis bundles like the CMS SEP-1 guidelines are too restrictive, requiring an all-or-nothing approach to achieve compliance. These bundles fail to prioritize the most important bundle components while penalizing providers for meaningless omissions that have no impact on mortality.

Emergency clinicians who underestimated their own opiate prescribing were impacted more profoundly to reduce prescriptions by being shown their opiate prescribing data compared to their peers.

Episodic prescribers (most prescribers in the ED) contributed to less than 3% of the total morphine milligram equivalents prescribed, compared to the top 5% of prescribers who were responsible for 48.8%. Efforts to curb the opioid supply may be better served by targeting high-quantity prescribers.

Our patients face serious obstacles when trying to get timely follow up from the ED. This secret shopper study found that only 32% could obtain 7-day follow up.  The best predictor of getting 7-day follow up was when the caller posed as having commercial insurance.

This may come as a shock, but when you tell patients no, it negatively impacts patient satisfaction.  But that doesn't make you a bad doctor, regardless of what CMS says.