Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Multicenter Study
Emergency Department Vital Signs and Outcomes after Discharge.
Vital signs are critical markers of illness severity in the emergency department (ED). Providers need to understand the abnormal vital signs in older adults that are problematic. We hypothesized that in patients age > 65 years discharged from the ED, there are abnormal vital signs that are associated with an admission to an inpatient bed within 7 days of discharge. ⋯ While we found a majority of patients discharged with abnormal vital signs as defined by the analysis, not to be admitted after discharge, we identified vital signs associated with at least twice the odds of admission.
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The objective was to characterize geriatric patients' use of online health information (OHI) relative to younger adults and assess their comfort ith OHI compared to health information (HI) from their physician. ⋯ Although many older patients used OHI, they were less likely than younger adults to use the Internet immediately prior to an ED visit. Despite often using OHI, patients of all age groups found healthcare information from their doctor easier to understand and more trustworthy than information from the Internet. As health systems work to efficiently provide information to patients, addressing these perceived deficiencies may be necessary to build effective OHI programs.