Category: Emergency Department

This week, our city staged a mass-casualty disaster drill. In preparing for it, I found that there is very little written about the medical director’s responsibilities in disaster preparation. The scenario was this: terrorists explode bombs at Mapfre stadium (home to the Columbus Crew professional soccer team) and John Glenn Airport then attack civilians with guns. At the same time, a truck runs into a crowd at Otterbein University and then the driver gets out and starts shooting into the crowd. In this year’s mock disaster, there are 500 trauma victims that are then dispersed to hospitals throughout Central Ohio.

The Joint Commission requires U.S. hospitals to do at least 2 disaster drills per year and each one is a little different. For example, we’ve had a simulated plane crash at the airport and a simulated super-flu epidemic in the past. The hospital sets up a command center and everyone wears a vest with a tag identifying that person’s role – incident commander, medical director, logistics director, communications director, public relations, etc. The medical director’s job can be summarized in two words: inventory and coordinate. Inventory available physician resources and coordinate to direct those resources to where they are needed. Here is how I approach it:

Designate on-site physician leaders in key areas. They don’t necessarily have to be specialists in those areas but they need to be knowledgable about those particular physicians and their needs. So, for example, a hospitalist could coordinate for the ICU and an anesthesiologist could coordinate the surgeons. The key physician areas are:

• Emergency department
• Intensive care unit and critical care
• Surgery
• Anesthesia
• Hospitalists and medical specialists

Inventory physician assets. Find out who you have currently on-site in the hospital and who can be called in from home or outpatient locations. Don’t forget about residents or fellows. Start by paging all of the physicians who are scheduled to be working in the hospital that day and tally who you have from what specialties. Then page all of the physicians from specialties that you anticipate needing to determine who could come in to the hospital immediately if it was a real disaster. It is a good idea to use administrative staff to do this because it can be time consuming for you if 100 doctors are trying to respond to your pages. Also, do not have physicians call in to a phone number to confirm their availability because with a lot of physicians all trying to call in at the same time, they will just get a busy signal. Instead use text messaging and/or email. Because normal transportation routes may be impassable in a disaster, be prepared to give physicians that are driving to the hospital advice on the best routes to take to get in. The highest priority include:

• ER physicians
• General surgeons
• Critical care physicians
• Anesthesiologists
• Orthopedic surgeons

Depending on the specific disaster, you may also need hospitalists, radiologists, oral maxillofacial/ENT surgeons, ophthalmologists, or infectious disease

Inventory dischargable/transferable patients.

• Contact each admitting service/hospitalist to determine how many patients could be discharged immediately in order to free up bed capacity.
• Determine how many patients can be transferred out of the ICU and PCU immediately to lower acuity hospital units.
• Inventory emergency department patients who could be moved to other locations immediately (medical boarders waiting for an inpatient bed, psychiatric holds, etc.).
• Determine number of level 1, 2, 3, 4. & 5 patients in the ED and how many of the low acuity patients could be moved out of ED bays immediately to create ED capacity.
• Determine how many operating rooms you currently have open and how many you would have if you canceled all of the day’s elective surgical cases. For those operating rooms that currently have a surgery taking place, how long will the surgery take to complete so that you can use that OR for disaster victims?

Identify and inventory alternative treatment locations. What areas in the hospital could be converted to ICU-level care? For an ICU bed you basically have to have medical gases, monitoring equipment, and enough room to fit the patient plus equipment such as a ventilator. The PACU (surgical pre-op/post-op area) is a natural fit but it will likely be used for operating room support so other hospital locations may be more prudent. In our hospital, 2 areas that could be converted to ICU areas include the cath lab recovery rooms and the endoscopy suite recovery rooms.

What locations could be converted to non-surgical treatment areas? In a mass casualty event, there will be a lot of minor injuries, the so-called “walking wounded”. You will want to direct those victims to other locations so that you don’t clog up the emergency department and the operating room. Think “outside the box” to determine what units could be used for caring for minor injuries. For example, ambulatory clinic space can be used for treatment of minor abrasions and burns. At our hospital, we have a outpatient wound center and it can be converted to a temporary burn unit.

Work with the rest of the disaster center leaders to inventory equipment and supplies that your physicians will need. As the physician lead in the disaster command center, you will often be the one most knowledgable about needed resources:

• Mechanical ventilators will be needed to support victims needing to go the ICU; if there are a lot of surgical casualties, you may also need additional ventilators in the PACU because the anesthesiologists may not have sufficient time to extubate patients in the OR in order to expedite patient flow in and out of the OR. If you don’t have enough ventilators and BiPAP units in the hospital, how many can your medical supply vendor get you on short notice? Many communities (including Columbus) have emergency depot supplies of gas-powered ventilators that are not very fancy but will work in a pinch.
• IV fluids will be needed and often in large amounts. How many bags of lactated Ringers, saline, and plasmalyte do you have in stock?
• What is your current supply of blood for transfusions including number of units of O negative blood?
• Tetanus toxoid supplies in the pharmacy?
• Trauma tourniquets – how many do you have and where are they located?
• Central line kits – how many do you have in your hospital’s inventory?

Coordinate patient flow from ED triage physicians to appropriate inpatient/OR locations. In a true disaster, there will inevitably be some degree of unanticipated chaos. You will need to ensure adequate physician staffing at hospital locations managing victims and re-direct physicians to needed locations. The most effective way to do this is to use your various physician site/specialty leaders to give you on-site reports. Make sure you have their cell phone numbers loaded into your cell phone and use group texting so all of your physicians are getting up to date information.

Do a debriefing with your physicians. Find out what went well and what you can improve on the next time.

A great reference for disaster management is: Care of the Critically Ill and Injured During Pandemics and Disasters: CHEST Consensus Statement. October 2014: http://journal.publications.chestnet.org/issue.aspx?journalid=99&issueid=930941

April 6, 2017

Currently in our medical center, there is a running debate about whether the emergency department wait times should be posted on the internet. This is a polarizing question and there are very strong opinions on both sides of the issue. What most people don’t realize is that your local hospital’s ER wait times are already posted on the internet at Medicare’s hospital compare website where you can find the average number of minutes you will wait:

• Total wait to be admitted to the hospital (national average is 5.6 hours)
• Wait to be admitted to the hospital after a doctor decides you need to be admitted (national average is 2.2 hours)
• Total time spent in the ER for non-admitted patients (national average is 2.9 hours)
• Time in the ER before you are evaluated by a healthcare professional (national average is 30 minutes)

If you don’t want to go to the Medicare website, you can go to the Yelp website and search your local hospital and find the same information.

Many hospitals have responded by putting their current wait times on-line or even on billboards outside of the hospital, updated every 5-15 minutes.

But if you read the fine print, it turns out that the ER wait time can mean different things. For example, at HCA Virginia hospitals, the on-line ER wait time is defined as “…the time of patient arrival until the time the patient is greeted by a qualified medical professional” (physician, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant). On the other hand, at the INOVA hospitals in Virginia, the on-line ER wait time is defined as the “…period from registration to assignment of provider (doctor, nurse practitioner or physician assistant)”. At WakeMed in North Carolina, the on-line ER wait time is defined as “…check-in to care being initiated by a doctor, nurse practitioner or physician assistant”. At Middlesex Hospital in Connecticut, the on-line ER wait time is defined as the time “…from registration to having a physician assigned to the case”. When I checked their website this morning, The Mountain States Health Alliance in eastern Tennessee/western Virginia boasted that 8 of their 11 hospitals had an ER wait time of zero minutes but they define their ER wait time as “…amount of time people have been in the waiting room”.

If you read these words carefully, you can see how it would be easy for hospitals to game the system. If I was the medical director at any of these hospital systems, here’s how I would make my ER wait times look better:

• HCA Virginia. I would put a physician assistant behind the registration desk so that each patient would be “greeted by a qualified medical professional” as soon as they walked in the door.
• INOVA Hospitals and Middlesex Hospital. I would have the registration staff “assign a provider” when the patient first registers at the front desk of the ER and then the patient can go wait in the waiting room until an ER bed is available.
• WakeMed Hospital. I would have each patient go straight from the registration desk to a triage area where a nurse practitioner would check that patient’s vital signs, thus minimizing the time from “check-in to care being initiated by a nurse practitioner”.
• Mountain States Health Alliance Hospitals. I would build out a 25-bay triage ward where patients would be taken as soon as they register so that they don’t have to wait in the “waiting area”.

So what are the advantages of publicly reporting your emergency department wait times?

1. It is great advertising. A low posted ER wait time is a great marketing tool to attract insured patients to your hospital.
2. Motivate your staff. If the doctors and nurses all see a big clock on the ER wall with the current wait time, it gets them motivated to move a little faster.
3. Better allocation of resources. If the ER wait time is getting excessively high, then the hospital’s nursing director may be able to re-assign nurses from slow units to the ER and the medical director may be able to bring in additional ER doctors to help out or hospitalists to reduce inpatients “boarding” in the ER.
4. Improve patient satisfaction. If you know that the ER wait time is 90 minutes, you’re less likely to be angry if you sit in the waiting room for 90 minutes than if you were expecting to be seen right away.
5. Discourage low-acuity patients when the ER is busy. When your ER is full of patients with heart attacks and broken legs, you don’t want to take up precious rooms with a patient who comes in just because he has a cold. Presumably, that patient with a cold will either stay home, go elsewhere, or come back to your ER another time if he sees that he is going to have to wait a long time.
6. You control the message. As can be seen from the examples above, there are many ways to define “ER wait time” and you can pick the number that makes your ER look best or that best suits your purposes for posting the ER wait time.
7. Even out the work load among different hospitals. If your hospital is part of a larger health system with multiple hospitals in a single geographic area, then this is a way of insuring that the patient distribution among the different hospitals stays even. This makes staffing easier and improves staff satisfaction. This is particularly the case when office-based physicians have to send a patient to the emergency room – knowing which ER has the shortest wait time can best match the health system’s resources with the health system’s physicians’ needs at any given moment.
8. Improve timeliness of care in the community. If the EMS squads know that one hospital has an unusually long wait time, then they can re-direct squads to another hospital in the community that is less busy thus ensuring that the entire geographic area’s health needs are being optimized. This has the potential to decrease ER overcrowding and is more proactive than waiting until an ER goes on “divert” status because they can’t take any more patients.

OK, what about the disadvantages of publicly reporting your emergency department wait times?

1. “Self-triaging” can be dangerous to patients. A patient with a potentially serious condition may choose to stay home rather than go to the ER if the posted wait time is too long.
2. They are not accurate. The ER wait time is inevitably going to be an average for all patients. However, an ER does not work on a  “first come, first served” basis. A patient with chest pain suspicious for a heart attack is always going to be taken back first, no matter how long the less acute patients have been waiting. So, an average wait time of 30 minutes may mean 0 minutes if you are having a stroke but 60 minutes if you have poison ivy.
3. Increase stress level of the ER staff. If the doctors and nurses feel like they can’t keep up with the hospital’s wait time goal, (often because of patient surges that they can’t control), then they are at risk for getting burned out.
4. You may look bad compared to the hospital a few miles away. Particularly if the other hospital chooses a different definition of ER wait time that is more easily achieved than your hospital does.
5. You may discourage business. ER charges can be very lucrative, particularly for patients paying out of pocket or patients with commercial insurance. You hate to turn away paying customers.
6. Risk patient satisfaction. If you define your ER wait time as “time to assignment of provider” but it still takes 2 hours before the patient actually sees that provider after the provider is assigned, the patient is going to be pretty unhappy if she expected the wait time to mean the time from walking in the door until a physician lays eyes on her.

So, what is the right answer? Well… there isn’t one. You first have to decide what your hospital’s motivation is for posting ER wait times – is it a marketing tool or a resource allocation tool? Next, you have to decide where you want to post waiting times – you will have vastly different effects (and different audiences) if you publicly post times on-line versus on a sign in the ER lobby versus on the hospital’s non-public website. Lastly, you have to decide how you are going to define your ER wait time.

My recommendation is to start by just reporting your ER wait time internally to hospital staff where you can trend the data and determine how you are going to use it to improve patient flow. Then pick a definition of wait time that is meaningful from an administrative standpoint, such as time from registration to actually being seen a physician/NP/PA in an ER room. Once you are internally comfortable with the information and what it actually means, then make it publicly available.

Publicly posted ER wait times should be a part of overall hospital strategy, not a means of hospital self-flagellation.

March 19, 2017

“39 yo female presented in cardiac arrest after being found down with needle in her arm. Multiple epinephrine and Narcan given prior to arrival with no ROSC. Resuscitation continued briefly with PEA on monitor and patient was pronounced dead.” Every week, we review all deaths in the hospital. One of our quality nurses summarizes each case in a couple of sentences. Every 2-3 weeks, there is one similar to this one from last week. The perpetrators: heroin and fentanyl.

We often consider heroin abuse as a problem of modern times. But opioid use has been with us for at least 5,000 years and heroin abuse has been a plague on humanity for more than 100 years. It all started with the ancient Sumerians. They migrated from what is now Iran to settle between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers around 5,000 BC. They had one key advantage over all of the other tribes in the area, in that they learned irrigation techniques to keep their crops from dying during periods of drought. They flourished and by 3,000 BC, they had invented writing and from their writing, we can learn about what crops they grew. For example, we know that they grew barley and about 40% of it went to the brewing of beer. They also grew poppies that they called the “plant of joy”.

By 500 BC, the secret of opium poppy cultivation spread to the Akkadians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, and then the Greeks. Two thousand years later in 1,500 AD, Europeans had figured out that you can get a stronger effect of opium by smoking it rather than by drinking it and from this was born the opium dens. With fast and sturdy sailing ships, the Europeans were eager trade with China for spice, porcelain, and silk. But Europe needed something to take to China in return and that something was opium.

In 1720, the British East India Company shipped 15 metric tons of opium to China and by 1840, that had increased to 2,555 metric tons. In 1804, morphine was first extracted from opium and it rapidly gained commercial success as an analgesic. In 1874, a chemist in London was experimenting with morphine by mixing it with various acids and he created diacetylmorphine. His work was forgotten and then in 1897, Felix Hoffman, working for the Bayer chemical company accidentally synthesized diacetylmorphine when he was trying to produce codeine. Scientists at Bayer had just invented another drug that they called aspirin and the head of Bayer decided to move forward with diacetylmorphine first because it was felt to have more commercial potential than aspirin. They called their new product heroin and said that it was 10 times more effective then codeine as a cough medicine and more effective than morphine as a pain reliever. They also pushed it as a treatment for asthma, bronchitis, and tuberculosis. In its first year, Bayer produced 1 ton of heroin. It was initially claimed to be completely non-addictive but soon there were heroin addicts world-wide and by 1913, Bayer decided to stop producing the drug.

Today, 80% of the world’s heroin comes from poppies grown in Afghanistan. Here in the United States, most heroin comes from Mexico and Colombia. Mexican heroin production has significantly increased over the past decade, rising from 26 tons in 2013 to an estimated 70 tons in 2015. The reason for the increase is the economics of capitalism in its purest form. First, Drug cartels previously were primarily in the business of cocaine and marijuana importation but with the increase of legalized marijuana production in the United States for recreational and medicinal purposes, the demand for illegal Mexican marijuana fell significantly. Second, coincident with this was the burgeoning appetite of Americans for opioid prescription pain pills resulting in a rather dramatic increase in the American demand for opioids. With a recent nation-wide crackdown on excessive opioid prescriptions, the supply of pills dried up. The reduction in the demand for Mexican marijuana and the increase in demand for opioids resulted in a ramped up production in Mexican heroin as business shifted from cannabinoids to opioids. It is simple supply and demand – the heart of capitalism.

A big part of the cost of heroin is the transportation costs – getting it across the U.S. border. As with any transportation cost, if you can decrease the size of your product, you can reduce your cost to get it to the market. Enter fentanyl. In medicine, we’ve used it as an intravenous anesthetic for many years. It is 50-100 times more potent than heroin. Therefore, by adding fentanyl to heroin, you can dramatically decrease the size and weight of the opioid, thus significantly decreasing transportation costs. So now, we have heroin that is often more than just heroin and will additionally contain fentanyl and its many derivatives, such as carfentanil (which is 100 times more potent than fentanyl)

The net effect of this is that we now have heroin available on the street that is more potent and cheaper than ever before. A single dose of heroin costs about $10-$15 dollars. In comparison, to buy a 40 mg oxycontin tablet on the street will cost about $25-$40. So, heroin is now usually cheaper than prescription pain pills when purchased illegally. As “pill mills” declined, street sales of heroin exploded.

In 2014, 1 out of every 300 Americans used heroin and more than 10,000 Americans died from heroin overdose. And the number keep going up. In 2015, 1,424 Ohioans died from a heroin overdose, an increase from 1,196 in 2014. Fentanyl overdose deaths in Ohio increased from 503 in 2014 to 1,155 in 2015. Last year, Franklin County (Columbus, OH) had 279 drug overdose deaths. Heroin and fentanyl have emerged as the top overdose killers in our state. At the same time, deaths from prescription opioids has fallen.

The Sumerians didn’t die of overdoses from sipping tea made from poppies 5,000 years ago. The Europeans didn’t die from overdoses from smoking opium 300 years ago. And people didn’t die from drinking Felix Hoffman’s newly invented heroin 100 years ago. But today, we have cheap and incredibly powerful heroin and fentanyl derivatives that make it all too easy to overdose and die, for as little as $15 or $20. So, for the near future, a chief complaint of “Found down with needle in her arm” will continue to be a common first line in the emergency room chart and a common epitaph on our nation’s gravestones. Opioid deaths come down to the principles of Economics 101.

January 3, 2017

Every day, I get an email with all of the statistics from the previous day’s emergency department activity. The one statistic that can drive me crazy is the emergency department diversion hours. These occur when the ER goes on “divert” status which means that emergency squads are told to bypass our emergency department and take patients to some other hospital’s emergency department. We never close the emergency department and patients can still walk-in to the ER normally.

There are several reasons that the ER can go on divert:

1. The ER itself is overwhelmed (for example, multiple critically ill patients arrive at the same time)
2. We don’t have any empty beds on the nursing units to admit patients to from the ER
3. We don’t have any ICU beds to admit patients to from the ER
4. We don’t have enough inpatient nurses to take care of more admissions

Diversion is bad news for several reasons. First, and most importantly, it means that our hospital does not have the resources to care for the patients in our community at that particular time. A patient who lives 5 blocks away should not have to be taken to another hospital 15 miles away where their family and friends cannot easily visit. Second, it disrupts continuity of care. Patients who always get their care in one hospital and whose physicians practice at that hospital are best served by being taken care of by the doctors who know them the best. Third, it is bad business. Hospital admissions are the fuel that keeps the hospital running and patients arriving by squad are far more likely to be admitted to the hospital than those who walk in through the front door who are more likely to be treated and released.

Last year, our ER diversion hours reached record highs. Rather than being a rarity as it had been for more than a decade, it was becoming a regular occurrence, at least once a week. Our initial solution was to open up 4 new ER beds and 5 new inpatient beds to avoid the “no room at the inn” phenomenon. That helped but didn’t solve the entire problem entirely. So next, we asked the 5 whys.

The 5 whys was a concept developed by the founder of the Toyota Corporation, Sakichi Toyoda. His idea was that if you identify a problem, then you keep asking why it occurred through 5 layers of inquiry in order to get to the root of the problem and solve it. So, for example, you identify a problem that your medical students are passing out when holding retractors during pancreatic surgeries.

1. Why are the medical students passing out? Because they are hypoglycemic.
2. Why are they hypoglycemic? Because pancreas surgeries go on for 5 hours and the medical students haven’t had anything to eat.
3. Why don’t they get something to eat before the start of surgeries? Because they are pre-rounding on their patients until 8:00 AM and all of the donuts in the physician lounge are gone by 7:00 AM.
4. Why are all of the donuts gone by 7:00 AM? Because the donut company only brings 3 boxes of donuts even though the administrator in charge of donuts always orders 8 boxes of donuts.
5. Why do they only bring 3 boxes rather than 8 boxes of donuts? Because the donut administrator always fills the donut order out in blue ink and faxes the order to the donut company and since the blue ink doesn’t fax well, the “8’s” look like “3’s”.

So, what is the solution to the syncopal medical students? Buy the donut administrator a pen with black ink.

We applied this principle to our emergency squad diversion problem. First, we looked at the what days of the week we were going on divert and found that over the course of a year, diversion hours peaked on Wednesdays, pretty regularly and pretty dramatically on Wednesdays. In contrast, diversion was very rare on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays. Next, we looked at when our emergency department admissions peaked and it was on Mondays, again, pretty regularly and dramatically peaked on Mondays. Next we looked at when our elective surgery admissions peaked and it was on Tuesdays, very consistently on Tuesdays.

So the solution wasn’t to bring in extra ER physicians on Wednesdays or open additional inpatient beds on Wednesdays. The solution was to move one of our busiest orthopedic surgeons from operating on Tuesdays to operating on Thursdays. What had been happening was that we would get a bolus of emergency department visits on Mondays followed by a bolus of joint replacement surgery admissions  on Tuesdays and then by Wednesdays, we’d be out of inpatient beds. By Fridays, the Monday and Tuesday admissions would be ready for discharge and then we’d have excess inpatient capacity through the weekend. By moving the orthopedic surgeon to Thursdays, we evened out the admissions over the course of the week and presto, the ER diversion hours plummeted.

The 5 whys can keep you from making stupid decisions. Getting back to our medical students who were passing out in the OR, if we had stopped with the first why, we may have banned medical students from holding retractors. If we had stopped with the second why, we may have told the surgeon that he needs to finish his pancreas surgeries in 4 hours. If we had stopped with the third why, we may have required the medical students to come in an hour earlier to do their rounding. If we had stopped with the fourth why, we may have fired the donut company. It was only after the fifth why that the solution of buying a 99¢ black ballpoint pen to fix the problem became apparent.

December 17, 2016

Suicide in the U.S. is increasing. It is the second leading cause of death for people age 10-34 and the tenth leading cause of death overall. Americans favorite method of suicide: firearms. One of the reasons for our country’s increasing suicide rate is the declining number of psychiatric beds compared to other nations. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is a group of the top 35 industrialized countries in the world. A recent study analyzing the U.S. suicide rate found that it correlates perfectly with our declining psychiatric bed availability. Since 1998, we have had a 35% drop in the number of psychiatric beds. At the same time, we have seen a 24% increase in suicides.

In the U.S., there are 22 psychiatric beds per 100,000 population. The average world-wide is 72 per 100,000. Only 4 other countries have fewer psychiatric beds per capita than the United States: Italy, Chile, Turkey, and Mexico. Our annual suicide rate is 13 per 100,000 population which is high compared to the global average of 11.4 per 100,000.

It is not because we are psychiatrically healthier. Here in Central Ohio, our psychiatric beds are almost always full. This results in psychiatric patients backing up in our emergency departments, waiting to be admitted. Last week, for example, when I got in to work, we had 11 patients in the ER who were “psych holds”, that is patients who were determined to be at too high of risk of causing harm to themselves or others to release. They occupied 38% of all of our ER beds. Because each of these patients requires a “sitter” to watch them to ensure that they do not harm themselves or leave the ER, it ends up being an enormous use of hospital staff and resources.

The time suicidal patients spend in the emergency department is often wasted time. There are usually not psychiatrists, counselors, and social workers who can initiate the psychiatric care that the patients need. The patients are psychiatry purgatory, waiting to go somewhere that they can get their treatment.

As a society, we are under a constant demand to increase emergency department beds in order to meet the needs of our communities. Perhaps our first step should not be increasing ER beds but instead, increasing psychiatric beds. Surely the greatest economic powerhouse nation in the world can at least strive to be average in psychiatric care.

November 9, 2016

Yesterday, a man was shot a couple of miles from our hospital. Not an unusual event, people get shot every day in America’s large cities. Our hospital is not a designated trauma center but we still have gunshot victims dropped off at our front lobby by their friends – either they die in our ER or we stabilize them and send them to one of the regional trauma centers in Columbus. Guns are a way of life in our city, as they are in all cities in the U.S. We require all patients to go through metal detectors to get into the emergency department – as do all hospitals in town – and finding guns is not uncommon at the metal detector. We require anyone with a weapon to hand it over to our security personnel until they leave – a lot like an old west saloon.

Shootings and murder are commonplace in the United States. We kill each other more than any other first world nation and we are right up there with third world countries where a murder doesn’t even make headlines. We’re pretty good at the detective work that goes into solving those murders, our problem is that we just have too many of them.

To kill a person, two things have to happen. There has to be someone who wants to kill someone else and they have to have an effective way of killing. So, if killing another person requires both intent and an available method, which of these is the reason for the United State’s exceptionally high murder rate compared to peer countries? I’d like to think that it is not because Americans are full of more hatred than other industrialized nations.

A gun is a highly effective way to kill someone and we have too many of them. Guns are everywhere in the United States. We have more guns per capita than any other country on earth. In fact, we have more guns than we have people in our country.

What is the answer? I’m not any smarter than anyone else. But solutions need to start with what we agree on instead of starting with what we disagree on.

I think everyone in the U.S. would agree that a person shouldn’t be able to walk into a sporting goods store and by a nuclear weapon. But almost everyone would agree that a person who wants to go duck hunting should be able to buy a shotgun.

Everyone would agree that someone who was previously convicted of felony armed robbery and is also a card-carrying member of a terrorist group should not be allowed to buy guns. But almost everyone would agree that a law abiding citizen with no criminal record should be allowed to buy a gun.

We agree with the extremes of gun control. What we disagree with is where the line needs to be drawn in the middle. By spending all of our political energy on fighting each other in courts and legislatures about exactly where that middle line is for gun control, we’ve accomplished almost nothing. If we instead started with the fringes of the gun control debate and tried to figure out on what we can agree on, we might actually get something accomplished.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a raging liberal out to pry guns from everyone’s hands. I used to be a member of the NRA (when I perceived it as being an organization primarily dedicated to gun safety and recreational hunting rather than a lobby group for gun ownership). Some of my fondest memories from childhood were bird hunting with my father in early winter in rural Southern Ohio. And I’ve personally annihilated hundreds of clay pigeons over the decades (with permanent tinnitus as evidence).

But having too many guns and putting them in the hands of the wrong people just creates a lot more work for all of us who keep America’s hospitals working. As it is right now, we just make it too easy to kill each other in our country. For most of Americans, the topic of gun control is polarizing. But if you work in an emergency department or a trauma operating room, the lack of gun control is just exhausting.

Sorry to be up on a soap box about this. But we have to make steps to stop our country from being the murder capital of the Western World. I would much prefer my hospital to focus on treating disease than treating the consequences of motive + opportunity.

October 18, 2016

Every day in Ohio, 5 people die of drug overdoses. We see heroin overdoses in or ER every day. The lucky ones are brought in when they are still breathing and before they get brain damage. The unlucky ones get resuscitated in the ER and make it to the ICU but then die from anoxic brain injury or pneumonia. And the really unlucky ones get pronounced dead in the emergency department. Deaths from heroin and other opioids have exploded in the past few years. State pharmacy boards and medical boards have cracked down on excessive prescription pain medications while at the same time, heroin became cheaper and cheaper. So heroin became the opioid of choice for many drug users. Then it became more powerful with stronger batches of heroin and heroin that was laced with other, even more powerful opioids like fentanyl.

So now we are in the midst of an epidemic of heroin overdose deaths.

Enter Project DAWN (Deaths Avoided With Naloxone). The goals of Project DAWN are to teach people how to recognize the signs of an overdose, how to do rescue breathing, and how to administer intranasal naloxone (the overdose antidote). In order to promote the distribution of intranasal naloxone, you can now buy it over the counter at retail pharmacies without a prescription. It costs about $140 for a box of two doses. The hope is to get naloxone into the hands of families and friends of heroin users who can provide the life-saving heroin antidote before the heroin user stops breathing and suffers brain damage or death.

But the problem is that we often aren’t getting the drug into the hands of those who really need it. Dr. Mike Dick, the Medical Director of our emergency department does know who needs it. It is the people who come into our ER with heroin overdoses. He knew that the best way to keep those persons with heroin overdoses from dying at home was to get the intranasal naloxone into their hands (and their families’ hands). Writing a prescription for it didn’t work – the patients just weren’t going to go the drug store to buy it.

On the surface, the answer seemed simple, dispense it from our hospital pharmacy. The problem is that our hospital pharmacy is an inpatient pharmacy and not an outpatient pharmacy so we can’t dispense drugs. As an example, if we use an albuterol inhaler to treat a patient in the emergency department, we can’t give it to the patient to take with them; we have to throw it away.

So Dr. Dick and our director of pharmacy worked out a way to legally provide patients with heroin overdoses with intranasal naloxone in the ER. For those patients with health insurance, it is usually covered by their insurance. For those patients without insurance, if we give them a dose of naloxone, then maybe we can prevent another emergency department visit that we wouldn’t get paid for anyway. Our hospital became the first in Central Ohio to dispense intranasal naloxone directly to patients in the ER. In July and August, we dispensed 36 doses to patients before leaving the ED. Of those, 81% had health insurance. They ranged in age from 24 to 66 years old. It is too early to tell whether the program is effective yet. We still see overdoses pretty much every day and we still pronounce patients dead in the ER after heroin overdose.

But maybe if we can just save one life…

September 22, 2016

No matter what your political leanings, one thing we can all agree on is that the United States does not have enough inpatient psychiatric beds. De-institutionization of patients with psychiatric disease in the 1970’s has overall been a good thing for most patients with psychiatric disease but the consequence is that there are many patients living in the community with inadequate mental health resources. That coupled with changes in reimbursement for psychiatric disease has resulted in more patients needing acute psychiatric care than can be accommodated in existing psychiatric hospitals. Between 2009 and 2016, Franklin County (the county that Columbus is in) saw a 157% increase in the number of patients presenting to the emergency departments in the county’s hospitals that needed inpatient psychiatric care.

As a result, psychiatric patients with no place to go fill up emergency room beds. A recent study from Wake Forrest University determined that psychiatric patients wait 3.2 times longer in the emergency room for admission compared to non-psychiatric patients (1,089 minutes versus 340 minutes). As mentioned in a previous blog post, room turnover rates are a key metric in emergency department efficiency and this increase in ED length of stay by the psychiatric “boarders” resulted in a loss of 2.2 room turnovers which equates to a loss of $2,264 to the hospital per psychiatric patient.

At our medical center, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Dr. Natalie Lester has a real passion for acute care psychiatry in the emergency department and she has turned that passion into some very tangible improvements in throughput of patients with psychiatric disease in our hospital’s emergency department. In 2013, telepsychiatry was introduced in the ED resulting in a drop in ED arrival time to psychiatric consultation from 14.9 hours to 7.7 hours! This translated to a drop in total ED length of stay from 25.6 hours to 21.8 hours.

In 2014, the Department of Psychiatry opened an 8-bed psychiatric observation unit at our medical center in close proximity to the University Hospital ED (on campus – about 8 miles from our hospital, University Hospital East). That resulted in a temporary reduction of ED psychiatric length of stay by one-third. Since then, however, the length of stay has gone up as the increasing demand for inpatient psychiatric care continues to outstrip supply.

In Central Ohio, there have been new psychiatric hospitals built but they limit their admissions to patients with commercial insurance with the result that there have been essentially no new beds available for patients with Medicaid. This is an enormous problem at our hospital because 65% of our emergency department’s psychiatric patients have Medicaid but only about 13% have commercial insurance. Furthermore, most free-standing psychiatric hospitals do not have the resources to manage patients with concurrent complex medical illness and those that require electroconvulsive therapy, etc.

Dr. Lester found that currently, 10% of the total number of patient care hours in our emergency department was spent managing patients with psychiatric disease. At the current rate of increase of emergency department utilization, by 2019, she projects that 22% of all emergency department hours will be used for care of psychiatric patients. We define the emergency department as being on “psych surg” if > 15% of the ED beds are occupied by psychiatric patients. Between the 2 emergency departments at our medical center, 56% of the hours of the year, one of the EDs is on psych surg. Clearly this is not sustainable nor is our situation unique compared to most other hospitals in the United States. So what can a hospital medical director do?

1. Advocate for a move away from a traditional model of the ED consulting psychiatry and then admitting for treatment to a model where treatment is started in the ED in order to possibly avoid admission altogether. Larger hospitals should consider creating psychiatric observation units that can specialize in this type of care.
2. Advocate for our communities to expand the number of inpatient psychiatric hospital beds.
3. Change reimbursement for inpatient (and outpatient) psychiatric care to expand availability of services.
4. Consider creation of psychiatric emergency departments in larger communities that can serve as a destination for emergency squads, police-delivered patients, as well as walk-ins thus off-loading regular emergency rooms to focus on medical/surgical problems.
5. Adopt telepsychiatry programs, especially in smaller hospitals that do not have full-time on-site psychiatry services.

These are very real problems and very real costs that all hospitals and all communities face. We must start planning now for the increase in psychiatric emergency care that is anticipated to affect all of us in the near future.

August 3, 2016