Department Blog - April 2016

Priya Kuppusamy, MD, and George Willis, MD, were faculty members for this year's Annual Educational Conferrence sponsored by the Maryland chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians. The conference was held in Linthicum Heights on April 8. Dr. Kuppusamy presented “The Pressure is On! Pregnancy Disasters,” and Dr. Willis's lecture was titled “When Seconds Count…The Crashing Aortic Dissection.” Michael Winters, MD, chaired the Planning Committee that compiled the conference program.

Ben Lawner, DO, MS, EMT-P, and Daniel Haase, MD, were faculty members for the East Coast Helicopter Operations (ECHO) Critical Care Weekend, held in Philadelphia in early April. Dr. Lawner was a member of the Trauma Case Series panel, which reviewed cutting-edge advances in trauma care and discussed indications for interfacility/aeromedical patient transfers. Dr. Haase served on the "Ask the Professor" panel, which reviewed critical care patient scenarios. ECHO was founded in 2013 to provide a means for emergency medical services and law enforcement flight programs to share experiences, train together, and brainstorm solutions to common challenges.

Amal Mattu, MD, with colleagues William Brady, MD, from the University of Virginia School of Medicine ,and Jeffrey Tabas, MD, from the University of California San Francisco, published the ECG of the Month in the April issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine. Their article describes the electrocardiographic manifestations of hyperkalemia in a diabetic man with altered mental status.

Douglas Sward, MD, was a faculty member for the 4th Mid-Atlantic Student Wilderness Medicine Conference, held last weekend in Philadelphia. He led a workshop on “Search and Rescue: Initial Actions and Reflex Tasks.” The event was hosted by the Wilderness and Disaster Medicine Society of the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University.

Rosemary Kozar, MD, PhD, from the Department of Surgery and STAR-ORC, and Ben Lawner, DO, MS, EMT-P, collaborated on a presentation about the preparations for and responses to last year’s civil unrest and riots in Baltimore from the perspectives of the University of Maryland Medical Center and the Baltimore City Fire Department. They were featured speakers during Medical Disaster Response 2016, a conference presented in Las Vegas on March 20 by the American College of Surgeons. The aim of the conference was to present practical information that trauma care providers can use to improve disaster response plans. Attendees included trauma surgeons, emergency physicians, and other specialists in emergency preparedness and disaster response.

Ken Butler, DO, presented two lectures at the Spring Seminar of the American College of Osteopathic Emergency Physicians, which was held in Scottsdale, Arizona, last week. The titles of his presentations were "Comas, Concussions, Contusions: A Review of Traumatic Brain Injury” and “Breathe Easy: Cutting-Edge Airway Management.”

Michael Witting, MD, MS, and Siamak Moayedi, MD, CDEM, published the article “Advanced Intravenous Access: Technique Choices, Pain Scores, and Failure Rates in a Local Registry” in the March issue of The American Journal of Emergency Medicine. Their investigation, supported by a grant from the Maryland Emergency Medicine Network, found that external jugular vein cannulation was established quicker, with fewer skin punctures and a lower rate of post-insertion failures, than ultrasound-guided cannulation of a peripheral vein. Their co-authors are Zhaoxin Yang, BS, a student at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and Cheryll Mack, MPA, BS, RN, who worked in the adult emergency department at the University of Maryland Medical Center at the time of the study

Douglas Sward, MD, Kinjal Sethuraman, MD, MPH, and Robert Rosenthal, MD, published the article “Carbon Monoxide and ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction: Case Reports” in the January/February 2016 issue of Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine.