Department Blog

Quincy Tran, MD, PhD, has received a scholarship from the Emergency Medicine Foundation to attend the Emergency Medicine Basic Research Skills Workshop. The 11-day course will be held in Dallas in November and April. Congratulations to Dr. Tran for succeeding in the highly competitve application process for this award!

The trauma care training program for physicians in Egypt, which was designed 10 years ago by Jon Mark Hirshon, MD, MPH, PhD, and colleagues in Shock Trauma and at Ain Shams University in Cairo, is the focus of an article in the July-August issue of the Journal of Surgical Education. To date, 639 physicians from multiple specialties have taken the 4-day course, which has been adopted by the Egyptian Emergency Medicine Board and is required training at several Egyptian medical schools.

Bryan Hayes, PharmD, is the lead author of the article titled “Social Media in the Emergency Medicine Residency Curriculum: Social Media Responses to the Residents’ Perspective Article,” published in the May issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine. This report categorizes contributions to a 14-day online discussion of an article on the integration of social media into the emergency medicine residency curriculum, which drew 1,033 “unique visitors” from 32 countries. The authors concluded that online interactions hold great potential for dissemination of knowledge and the generation of hypotheses for future research. The article was highlighted as an Editor’s Choice for Clinicians. 

Rose M. Chasm, MD,  and Veronica Pei, MD, MPH, MEd, are the lead authors of the article titled “Sex Differences in Risk of Hospitalization Among Emergency Department Patients with Acute Asthma,” published in the July issue of Annals of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology. This report is based on a study by the Multicenter Airway Research Collaboration, involving 2000 patients treated in 48 academic and community hospital emergency departments. Its findings are strikingly similar those published by the MARC in 1999: women remain at higher risk of hospitalization than men following an exacerbation, even though they are more likely to be under the care of an asthma specialist and to be following guideline-recommended pathways for the long-term management of asthma.

The May 2015 issue of Emergency Medicine Clinics of North America contains two review articles on infectious diseases, written by members of the EM faculty. The first, on the topic of Ebola, was compiled by the team of Drs. Mercedes Torres, Dave Jerrard, and Karen Hansen, at the height of national attention on the emergency medical system’s readiness to receive and treat patients suspected of carrying the virus. The second, by Dr. Ferras Khan, covers the enterovirus outbreak. These special-request publications were written on short notice earlier this year, in response to the outbreaks that were occurring at the time, with the goal of providing timely and applicable diagnostic and managemnet informtion to emergency medicine practitioners.

Drs. Jenny Guyther, Roger Stone, and Ben Lawner were faculty members for EMS Care 2015, held in Ocean City from April 30 to May 3. This popular annual event, sponsored by the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems, drew 250 prehospital care providers to its hands-on workshops, pre-conferences, lectures, and small group seminars. Dr. Guyther presented a lecture on the management of pain in children in the field. Dr. Stone co-led a case review of on-scene communications and presented a session on the pitfalls of downgrading from advanced to basic life support. Dr. Lawner presented the keynote address, covering recent articles in the EMS literature and the application of their findings to long-standing protocols, and a lecture on the use of resuscitation fluids in trauma patients. 

Mike Winters, MD, Joe Martinez, MD, and Haney Mallemat, MD, along with Bill Brady, MD, from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, published a review of recent critical care articles, covering the topics of cardiac arrest, sepsis, pulmonary embolism, ultrasound, and acute ischemic stroke. Their article appears in the June 2015 issue of the Journal of Emergency Medicine.

Ben Lawner, DO, MS, EMT-P, was a faculty member for the Maryland Resuscitation Academy, held on May 18 and 19 in Columbia. The goal of the 2-day conference, co-hosted by the Howard County Department of Fire Rescue Services and MIEMSS, was to provide education that will optimize outcomes after sudden cardiac arrest. The program is modeled after the Resuscitation Academy developed by Seattle Medic One and King County EMS in Washington state.

Michael Witting, MD, MS, and Mak Moayedi, MD, published an article titled “Incidence of Advanced Intravenous Access in 2 Urban EDs” in the May 2015 issue of the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. Their co-authors include Bryan Stover, MD, and Ashley Miller, BA, who were students at the University of Maryland School of Medicine at the time of the study and manuscript preparation. The investigators found a similar incidence (3.2%) in the need for advanced techniques to establish an IV line at UMMC’s adult ED and the ED at Mercy Medical Center. Their findings have implications for resource utilization, including strategies to minimize the delays in care that are associated with difficulty in gaining IV access.

Amal Mattu, MD, received the Distinguished Educator Award from the Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors in April. The award recognizes Dr. Mattu's success in the development of enduring educational materials, specifically his publication of ECGs for the Emergency Physician (with sales of 30,000 around the world and translations into Portuguese, Polish, Chinese, and Japanese) and his online curriculum, ECG Weekly, through which Dr. Mattu has posted weekly ECG cases since September 2011. This online tutorial has been viewed by health care providers in more than 200 countries and has logged 6.2 million minutes (12 years!) of video time watched.