Articles: emergency-medicine.
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No specialty better personifies the changes occurring throughout the health care delivery system than emergency medicine. It was just a short 25 years ago that the specialty of emergency medicine, as it is known today, emerged. ⋯ To develop a vision for the future of the specialty, it is important to first evaluate the current trends in health care and their influences on the specialty. Three significant areas stand out in the current health care landscape: consolidation of hospital systems, emergence of publicly traded physician practice management companies, and the increasing penetration of managed care.
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Historical Article
Legal history of emergency medicine from medieval common law to the AIDS epidemic.
The early development of legal obligation in emergency medicine is traced through medieval English common law to the first stages of American law after Independence. An identifiable set of legal principles in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is described. ⋯ In the modern era, there has been a substantial legal and ethical change to a requirement of extensive duties to operate open-admission emergency services in virtually all acute-care hospitals. The AIDS epidemic is utilized as a case example of expanded legal and ethical duties to offer emergency care in a nondiscriminatory manner to all patients presenting at hospital emergency departments.