Mistakes in the Emergency Department

This Academic Emergency Medicine piece reviews a significant level of patient concern about medical error in the ED setting. The numbers are interesting: "38% of patients reported experiencing at least one specific error-related concern, most commonly misdiagnosis (22% of all patients), physician errors (16%), medication errors (16%), nursing errors (12%), and wrong test/procedure (10%). Concerns were associated with gender (p < 0.01), age (p < 0.0001), ethnicity (p < 0.001), length of stay (p < 0.001), ED volume (p < 0.0001), day of week (p < 0.0001), and hospital type (p < 0.0001). Concerns were highly related to a patient's willingness to return to the ED."

The Web Made Me Sicker

University College London studied the health effect of the use of interactive tools, including the web, by patients with chronic illness. The study found that while the patients were more knowledgeable, they had no improvement in health outcomes or were in fact more ill.