Discover how Aidoc’s AI platform offers seamless end-to-end integration into a facility’s existing IT infrastructure enabling implementation of AI at scale.
Discover how Aidoc’s AI platform offers seamless end-to-end integration into a facility’s existing IT infrastructure enabling implementation of AI at scale.
The Future of Emergency Medicine: Current Challenges and 5 Emerging Trends
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Counter-culture, hippies, the civil rights movement and a quieter transformation – the rise of emergency medicine as a specialty – that was the sixties. The decade gave rise to the need to care for a rapidly growing (and aging) population of patients that was seeking immediate and unscheduled medical care for emergency conditions. The mass adoption of cars with the inevitable accidents that followed was part of this context. Twenty years later, emergency medicine was well established as a specialty. That’s how it started, but what does the future of emergency medicine look like today?
What is Emergency Medicine?
Emergency medicine focuses on providing immediate care for patients with acute illnesses or injuries requiring urgent medical attention. Emergency departments (EDs) are high-pressure environments, characterized by rapid decision-making, efficient communication and the ability to manage unpredictable patient volumes. Clinicians must prioritize care within strict timeframes, balancing the demands of critical care with operational efficiency. With the growing adoption of digital tools and AI, emergency medicine is evolving to optimize workflows, streamline communication and improve patient outcomes.
Critical Care vs. Emergency Medicine
While emergency medicine addresses a wide range of acute conditions upon a patient’s arrival, critical care involves the ingoing treatment of patients with life-threatening illnesses or injuries, often in intensive care units (ICUs). Emergency medicine teams prioritize triage and stabilization, quickly diagnosing and initiating treatment before transferring critical cases to specialized care teams. By contrast, critical care providers manage long-term, complex cases requiring continuous monitoring and advanced support systems. The distinction lies in the immediacy of care in the ED versus the sustained, intensive management of critical care settings.
How is Emergency Medicine Evolving?
Over the last decade or so, US Emergency Departments have evolved to become the front door for access to the entire health care system, requiring skills and capacity to respond to a range of needs beyond emergency care. Importantly, they’re also a primary source of hospital admissions.
By 2021, the number of ED visits per 100 persons reached a staggering 42.7 , and because the ED triggers most hospital admissions, it’s a crucial contributor to hospital finances. As a place of access to consistent care for those without health insurance and those seeking quick attention to their problems, people rely on EDs for primary health care, mental health services, social services and a variety of other vital services that are not necessarily emergency related.
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in fewer emergency admissions of the ‘traditional’ kind – myocardial infarctions, cerebrovascular accident and injuries. Social restrictions, along with the public’s fear of contracting the virus in hospitals and reluctance to overload the healthcare system, have had a major impact on EDs all over the world. Usual functioning has been disrupted; new clinical and ethical challenges for physicians have emerged. But emergency medicine is far from a dying field – physicians will always be needed to provide specialized, curated care for unplanned and unexpected emergency events. And there is no healthcare scenario plan that foresees a sustained reduction in these.
Top Emerging Trends in Emergency Medicine
Challenges in emergency medicine come in legal, ethical, technological, capacity-related and clinical forms. Some of them affect healthcare in general, but emergency medicine in particular. Litigation and the specter of medical liability, for example, especially in North America, drive particular pressures in emergency health care.
The Emergency Medicine Resident Association’s (EMRA) 2019 Advocacy Handbook found that 7% of emergency physicians are sued each year. A contributing factor is overcrowding, which US emergency rooms have struggled with for years. Crowding in EDs threatens the quality, safety, and timeliness of emergency care, whether caused by environmental factors or operational inefficiencies. Yet, speed – from ambulance to stretcher through triage, stabilization and admission or discharge – is the foundation of successful patient care. Hospitals are increasingly challenged to find ways to improve patient-care workflows, reduce overcrowding, and achieve maximum care with minimum wait.
Emergency treatment that involves the regular transfer of patients into crowded, noisy, and often chaotic ED environments make emergency medicine vulnerable to medical error.As the New York Times pointed out, “With patients crammed in every available space, ER nurses and other health care providers quickly become overwhelmed, leading to fatal medical errors and significant delays that affect the outcome of patients who have suffered heart attacks, strokes or infections.” Some of these errors and delays are down to miscommunication. According to some analyses, up to 80% of clinical errors (across the healthcare system), are due to miscommunication between medical staff. Can technology minimize error and improve patient workflows?
Image source: nytimes.com
Emergency Medicine Technology in the Future of Emergency Medicine
The potential of emergency medicine technology is expanding rapidly – apps for streamlining care, virtual care through telemedicine, point-of-care real-time diagnostic and screening devices, wearables with sensors for paramedics, drones that deliver care by air and the advanced use of the humble bar code to streamline patient flows – these are just a few.
Massive Cost Reductions
Many of these technologies are expected to help with ED challenges around escalating healthcare costs, mismatched resource utilization, avoidable admissions, medical error, swift diagnostics, and overcrowding. So it’s unsurprising that Healthcare Global reports that healthcare providers worldwide are rapidly adopting emerging medical technology: “More companies are turning to technology to increase the speed in assessing patients, providing more time to care for patients suffering terminal and chronic illnesses. … We are witnessing a sharp rise in medical technology – an industry estimated to be worth $467bn in 2020. The rise in AR and virtual reality apps have only served the change in the market, with many realizing the revolutionary potential of technology. As our healthcare professionals become overburdened with complicated procedures and more patients, technology is beginning to save and improve lives.”
Together, telemedicine, apps, drones and artificial intelligence (AI) are saving life and limb, and allowing more points of access to the healthcare system than brick and mortar ED departments do alone. AI, in particular, is expected to gain traction alongside the current expansion in use cases and realization of investment potential.
AI and the Future of Emergency Medicine
The field of medical AI is buzzing as adoption of these technologies continues to gain traction with proven use cases in emergency medicine. These include clinical decision support, triage, admin support, predictive analytics and diagnostic imaging.
The COVID-19 pandemic increased focus on AI investment as, besides the potential to improve clinical support, it provides automated solutions to repetitive, time-consuming tasks. This is particularly important in ED contexts where speed is crucial and machine learning (ML) takes swift charge of routine data entry and processing tasks. Before the pandemic, interest in AI was already accelerating. A 2019 survey found that one in two C-suite executives deployed AI and ML in their healthcare organizations. In upper-market organizations, AI and ML use was at 58%. As the Canadian virtual community of emergency medicine practitioners, CanadiEM, concludes: “AI has received considerable media attention for its applications in medicine given its ability to outperform human expertise in clinical predictions, diagnosis, and monitoring. The emergency department (ED) may be uniquely situated to benefit from AI, due to the diversity of patient information, the necessity of balancing probabilities for risk stratification, and the rapid decision-making.”
