This month theme issue editor, Trahern Jones, a fourth-year student at Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota, spoke with Dr. Edward Laskowski about the use of performance-enhancing drugs and substances among athletes today.
Neal Sikka, MD, Tina Choudhri, MD, and Robert Jarrin, JD
Medical schools should integrate health IT and biomedical informatics into their formal curricula. The George Washington University Emergency Medicine Telemedicine and Digital Health Fellowship was designed to train graduate physicians to use telemedicine in their clinical and research work.
Traci A. Wolbrink, MD, MPH and Jeffrey P. Burns, MD, MPH
Given the limited opportunities for experience in most pediatrics training programs, computer-based learning and simulation should be used to teach procedures before real patient encounters.
When a severely ill child comes into the emergency room, assent for emergency care is no more required than is parental permission. Conveying the needed care is the top priority.
Jalayne J. Arias, JD, MA and Kathryn L. Weise, MD, MA
Even when external factors such as nonaccidental injury weigh heavily on clinicians' perceptions, they should not lose focus on the patient's best interest when deciding whether to continue or withdraw treatment.
Extensive resources are required for its implementation, but there is a strong case that bar-code medication-verification technology should be a required practice for demonstrating "meaningful use" of health information technology under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Is it ethical to bend or suspend accepted notions of futility and continue treatment while a dying patient’s family journeys to the hospital emergency room to share her last minutes?
The metaphor of the ED as a safety net works on many levels. It’s visual. It has heroic dimensions. Many physicians and nurses were drawn, and find great purpose, in this ideal. But does it stoke expectations that can’t be met?