healthcare

The Future of Emergency Medicine

/ Nate / 1 Comment

So let’s say you’re having a bad day: you have bad enough abdominal pain that you decide it’s time to go to the ER.

Unfortunately, it’s not The Pitt: it’s my ER! Sucks to be you.

Bad fluorescent lights and plasticky chairs, a waiting room at capacity filled with vomiting children, and a wait that feels longer than you were prepared for. You get triaged and your vitals are taken. If you’re lucky, you wait three hours. You’re brought back to a room. A nurse asks you a bunch of dumb questions about whether you have guns in the home and whether you’ve recently traveled to Zambia. And then, someone walks in to see you.

Here’s the question: who is that person?

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A Highly Interchangeable Modular Part

/ Nate / 2 Comments

I wrote before about how emergency medicine is, in my opinion, a dying field. Maybe it’s already dead. Emergency departments and their physicians have lost the war on multiple fronts: declining reimbursement from payers, declining interest from medical students, pay cuts, increasing liability, encroachment from midlevel providers, and a lack of offramps. To spare your attention span, here are some bullet points – facts, not opinions.

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