The National Report Card on the State of Emergency Medicine: Evaluating the Emergency Care Environment State by State 2009 Edition
Article Outline
Discussion Points
A. How might hospital diversion and ED boarding be deleterious to resident education?B. Might these same factors affect medical students' decision to choose emergency medicine as a career?A. How were the measures weighted relative to one another?B. What does the weighting suggest about the importance of each category?
C. Is this a fair and consistent weighting?D. How does it compare to previous Report Cards?E. What additional measures would you like incorporated into the 2012 Report Card?
A. Why publish a Report Card on the state of emergency care?B. What utility does it serve to policymakers, payers, providers, and the public?C. Substantial variation exists among states in each of the 5 categories that comprise a grade. Discuss the factors within the Report Card that best explain this variation. Consider metrics at the patient, provider, and regulatory levels.A. The Report Card gives Massachusetts the highest overall state grade and Arkansas the lowest overall grade. Compare Massachusetts and Arkansas across the 5 categories used to assign a grade.B. Which categories most clearly show why Massachusetts outperforms Arkansas?C. Are there any metrics in which Arkansas outperforms Massachusetts?D. How should one interpret this head-to-head comparison, and what caveats exist for such comparisons?A. How might a policymaker interpret these recommendations?B. What are the barriers at the state and federal level to implementing such reforms?
Editor's Note: You are reading the seventh installment of Annals of Emergency Medicine Journal Club. This bimonthly feature seeks to improve the critical appraisal skills of emergency physicians and other interested readers through a guided critique of actual Annals of Emergency Medicine articles. Each Journal Club will pose questions that encourage readers—be they clinicians, academics, residents, or medical students—to critically appraise the literature.During a 2- to 3-year cycle, we plan to ask questions that cover the main topics in research methodology and critical appraisal of the literature. To do this, we will select articles that use a variety of study designs and analytic techniques. These may or may not be the most clinically important articles in a specific issue, but they are articles that serve the mission of covering the clinical epidemiology curriculum. Journal Club entries are published in 2 phases. In the first phase, a list of questions about the article is published in the issue in which the article appears. Questions are rated “novice,” () “intermediate,” () and “advanced” () so that individuals planning a journal club can assign the right question to the right student. The answers to this journal club will be published in the June 2009 issue. US residency directors will have immediate access to the answers through the Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors Share Point Web site. International residency directors can gain access to the questions by going to http://www.emergencymedicine.ucla.edu/annalsjc/ and following the directions. Thus, if a program conducts its journal club within 5 months of the publication of the questions, no one will have access to the published answers except the residency director. The purpose of delaying the publication of the answers is to promote discussion and critical review of the literature by residents and medical students and discourage regurgitation of the published answers.It is our hope that the Journal Club will broaden Annals of Emergency Medicine's appeal to residents and medical students. We are interested in receiving feedback about this feature. Please e-mail journalclub@acep.org with your comments.
PII: S0196-0644(08)01978-1
doi:10.1016/j.annemergmed.2008.11.001
© 2009 Published by Elsevier Inc.
Refers to article:
- The National Report Card on the State of Emergency Medicine: Evaluating the Emergency Care Environment State by State 2009 Edition
