News in brief - Feb. 14, 2011

Emergency doctors see many patients, frequent interruptions - MRSA screening could save hospitals money

Emergency doctors see many patients, frequent interruptions

Emergency physicians treat five or six patients at a time and spend most of their time reviewing charts, interpreting tests and performing other care activities that do not involve direct contact with patients, according to a study published online Jan. 28 in the Annals of Emergency Medicine (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21276642/).

Researchers shadowed 85 emergency physicians at two academic medical centers and two community hospitals for two-hour periods, recording how they spent their time. The physicians spent about an hour on indirect care activities and about a half hour directly interacting with patients. The study found that the doctors were interrupted frequently, with emergency physicians in academic settings interrupted twice as often as their counterparts in community hospitals.

Emergency departments should be redesigned to minimize interruptions, make communications more efficient and increase the time physicians spend with patients, the authors said.

MRSA screening could save hospitals money

Screening all hospital patients for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus upon admission could help reduce the spread of the superbug, but the practice is costly. A more targeted intervention to screen only patients in the intensive care unit and isolating those who test positive could save hospitals up to $500 per admission, according to a study in the February issue of the American Journal of Infection Control (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21281884).

The intervention would pay for itself, researchers estimated, because early detection of MRSA would lead to an overall drop in the infection and transmission rate within the hospital. MRSA is associated with about 19,000 deaths annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with yearly treatment costs for patients with MRSA estimated to be at least $3.2 billion.

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