Department Blog

Ken Butler, DO, presented the Grand Rounds lecture for the emergency medicine residency at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston on May 10. The title of his talk was “Ketamine Sequence Intubation.”

Laura Pimentel, MD, Clinical Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Chief Medical Officer, University of Maryland Emergency Network, Fermin Barrueto, MD, Senior Vice President/Chief Medical Officer, University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Health, and Jon Mark Hirshon, MD, MPH, PhD, Professor of Emergency Medicine, with colleagues from the schools of business at City University of New York, the University of Maryland College Park, and American University, published the article titled “Impact of Health Policy Changes on Emergency Medicine in Maryland Stratified by Socioeconomic Status” in the April issue of the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine. Their analysis found that implementation of the Affordable Care Act and of a global budget revenue structure for hospital reimbursement on January 1, 2014, changed emergency medicine practice and finance: admission and observation rates were lowered, fewer patients were uninsured, and professional revenue increased.

Amal Mattu, MD, was a featured speaker at the 3rd Dutch Emergency Cardiology Congress, held this week at the Albert Schweitzer Medical Center in Dordrecht, Netherlands. He presented the following lectures: ACS Mimics on ECG, WPW Finally Made Simple, STEMI without the STE on ECG, Touch Cases in Cardiac Ischemia, Bradycardia and AV Block, Emergency Cardiology Literature Update, Cardiac Arrest 2017, and PEA: A Simplified Approach.

Andrew Crouter, MD, Michael Abraham, MD, and R. Gentry Wilkerson, MD, published the case report titled “Emphysematous Pyelonephritis in a Renal Allograft” in the March issue of The American Journal of Emergency Medicine (35[3]:520.e1-520.e2).

Michael Bond, MD, our Residency Program Director, has been appointed as a member-at-large on the Board of Directors of the Council of Residency Directors in Emergency Medicine. The announcement was made during the organization’s annual Academic Assembly, held last week in Fort Lauderdale.

Laura J. Bontempo, MD, MEd, published “Family Medical History” in the Reflections column of Academic Emergency Medicine (24[2]:254-255, February 2017). In this pensive essay, Dr. Bontempo examines the impact of a question asked by many practitioners during their initial assessment of a patient. Routine inquiry into the family’s medical history becomes much less routine when heard from the patient's point of view.

Amani Mahdi, MD, MBBS, former emergency medicine research fellow, published "Pain Management in Vaso-occlusive Sickle Cell Crisis" in EMResident this month. Her article is available at www.emresident.org/sickle-cell-crisis/.

The American College of Emergency Physicians has issued a new policy on the diagnosis and management of adult psychiatric patients in EDs, available in the April issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine (69[4]:480-498). Jon Mark Hirshon, MD, MPH, PhD, is a member of ACEP's Clinical Policies Committee, which oversaw the development of the document.

Doug Sward, MD, presented a workshop during the Wilderness and Disaster Medicine course at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in early March. Titled “Search and Rescue: Initial Tasks and Reflex Actions,” his didactic presentation reviewed lost-person behavior and its application to rescue missions and was followed by a hands-on exercise that asked students to develop a search strategy using a topographic map. The 2-week course encourages students to improvise under austere conditions and prepares them to respond to emergencies in wilderness settings as well as disaster scenarios. A Wall Street Journal article about the course can be read here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/latest-medical-school-trend-wilderness-training-1490097604?emailToken=JRryd/96aHqXgdY1b8w43UEldbVNDuKFR1jeKDXRMUjLs3iQvfiswalwmNqzrW61Q0th/JUY9Wc+QzzXjy8zAJ7Jw+8gzw/4

Ming Yang, MD, and Stephen Thom, MD, PhD, collaborated with colleagues from the Department of Anesthesiology and the Shock, Trauma and Anesthesiology Research (STAR) Center (Alok Kumar, PhD, Bogdan Stoica, MD, David Loane, PhD, Gelareh Abulwerdi, Niaz Khan, Asit Kumar, PhD, and Alan Faden, MD) on the study that culminated in the article titled “Microglia-Derived Microparticles Mediate Neuroinflammation After Traumatic Brain Injury,” published in the March issue of the Journal of Neuroinflammation.