The Importance of Emergency Medicine
In September 1979 Emergency Medicine became recognized as a medical specialty in the United States.

Emergency medicine is perhaps the most critical discipline in determining a patient's long term health and quality of life. Diagnostic errors at the initial patient encounter can be fatal.

Emergency medicine extends beyond a patient's diagnosis. Emergency departments are the frontline resource in protecting the hospital staff and colleagues from infectious or air borne diseases. Emergency medicine now plays a greater role in national security and is at the heart of protecting a community from a biological or chemical disaster.

In just 25 years emergency medicine has grown from medical specialty to a medical necessity.

Emergency Department Case Study
The nurse tells you to see a very sick patient immediately. You have three minutes to make a diagnosis, decide on the best workup up plan and stabilize the patient. Your patient has difficulties with breathing and problems with vision, swallowing and weakness. What is the diagnosis? Vertebrobasilar Insufficiency, Myasthenia Gravis, Guillan-Barré, Tick paralysis, Polio, ALS?

Another patient has just arrived with the same symptoms and needs your attention now…

This was the presentation of an actual patient in a November 18, 2004, California statewide disaster drill. The first hospital to identify botulinum toxin exposure in the State used First Opinion EM to make the diagnosis.

When you consider the following statistics, you can see the value of First Opinion EM for your emergency department:

In one year...

• FDA issued 91 drugs and biologic recalls
• 298 safety related drug labeling changes were made
• 55 physicians safety notifications were issued
• Medline added 519,012 new articles

Medical Databases
One obstetrics database contains more than two million word documents, five million PDF files and thousands of slide presentations.

Medical Literature
You continually need to keep up with medical literature, government guidelines, government reports, clinical alerts from pharmaceutical companies, scientific conference presentations, and new developments both inside and beyond your specialty.

The answer may be out there, but do you have the time to find it? In June 2004 an ER physician wrote to the New York Times:

“early this month a man sat on the examining table cradling his left side in a peculiar way. He had already been to two emergency rooms, where two ''young doctors'' assured him that everything was fine. Everything was indeed fine in the usual places -- he did not have pneumonia, a broken rib, a kidney stone or colitis. But he could barely sit still for the pain. The fact that I knew instantaneously what his problem was -- and that two young emergency room doctors did not -- I ascribe entirely to an article published in 1942 that described the feeling of a blockage in the blood supply to the spleen with such heartbreaking precision that no one could ever forget it.”