The Efficiency Files
A collection of blogs, grouped into categories to help you many areas of your EM PA Life
The CC: Series
You don’t need another resource telling you how to treat a diagnosis.
You need an approach that helps you make the diagnosis that you didn’t think of.
The following blogposts are about common presenting complaints, and ways you can leverage your EMR to help you consistently consider life-threatening diagnoses on the undifferentiated patient without wasting time, energy, or tests.
Taking care of a stroke or STEMI is easy due to all the pre-set checklists and pre-hospital alerts
One of the harder things to do in medicine is slow down enough to think of a thorough differential diagnosis AND to document that thinking in your note, BUT no one said you have to free-type (or dictate) this on every note.
Instead, consider creating your own pre-populated smart phrases to instantly import into your EMR note.
Spending time writing a single smart phrase for all patients with undifferentiated symptoms will save you time later and may ever remind you to consider a potentially missed dangerous diagnosis on a busy, exhausting ER shift.
Procedural Proficiency
Perfecting procedures: in this blog section, you will learn how to improve your proficiency at particular procedures. How many reasons practice does not make perfect. Just two of those include the fact that if you are improperly practicing, you are only going to be really skilled at the wrong thing, which will actually be harder to unlearn to correct later. Rather, I suggest proper preparation preparing you for proficiency in getting consistent results. It’s also true that you can’t practice some of the most critical procedures in medicine every day or every month or even every year. To be able to do one of these rare Life-saving procedures, you need proper, easy to find, efficient preparation for the best results. Let’s face it we have all googled some procedure and watched it done on YouTube prior to “giving it a try.“ I suggest that we don’t do this. Utilize a template, and or an easy to find document That you have written that you can easily import into your chart and it will remind you of the steps that you need to take to properly perform the procedure when needed.
Legal Matters Blog Posts
Working as an expert witness has open my eyes to the importance of so many things outside of the scope of medicine or medical knowledge. As I often say to my students, some of the most important things that you will learn, actually have nothing to do with medical knowledge. Rather, it’s the legal landscape, professional behavior, and patient interactions that most dictate some of the most important moments in your career.
It’s story time blog
OK, so these aren’t the types of stories that you tell to your kids before they go to sleep, but drawing from that tradition, the human brain is exceptionally good at cultivating, creating, and remembering stories. In fact, humans are better at remembering facts within a song or story then they are at remembering a list. Therefore, here are some of my stories that help me remember a diagnosis, A treatment plan, And/or, just to remember the human side of what we do.
Life Lessons - Blog
In these blog posts, I share lessons I’ve learned over the years and I hope to share your stories in future post too. For my own experience, I know that some of the idiosyncrasies that have made me successful in emergency medicine can be a hindrance or a struggle in every day life outside of the hospital. My hope is by sharing these stories, you can learn to turn your strengths in medicine into your strengths in life.
Make it stand out.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Make it stand out.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
“It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
— Squarespace