A retrospective analysis of the need for on-site emergency physician presence and mission characteristics of a rural ground-based emergency medical service.

BACKGROUND: This study aimed to address the challenges faced by rural emergency medical services in Europe, due to an increasing number of missions and limited human resources. The primary objective was to determine the necessity of having an on-site emergency physician (EP), while the secondary objectives included analyzing the characteristics of rural EP missions. METHODS: A retrospective study was conducted, examining rural EP missions carried out between January 1st, 2017, and December 2nd, 2021 in Burgenland, Austria. The need for physical presence of an EP was classified based on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) score into three categories; category A: no need for an EP (NACA 1-3); category B: need for an EP (NACA 1-3 along with additional medical interventions beyond the capabilities of emergency medical technicians); and category C: definite need for an EP (NACA 4-7). Descriptive statistics were used for analysis. RESULTS: Out of 16,971 recorded missions, 15,591 were included in the study. Approximately 32.3% of missions fell into category A, indicating that an EP's physical presence was unnecessary. The diagnoses made by telecommunicators matched those of the EPs in only 52.8% of cases. CONCLUSION: The study suggests that about a third of EP missions carried out in rural areas might not have a solid medical rationale. This underscores the importance of developing an alternative care approach for these missions. Failing to address this could put additional pressure on already stretched EMS systems, risking their collapse.

Digital Technology Applications in the Management of Adverse Drug Reactions: Bibliometric Analysis.

Adverse drug reactions continue to be not only one of the most urgent problems in clinical medicine, but also a social problem. The aim of this study was a bibliometric analysis of the use of digital technologies to prevent adverse drug reactions and an overview of their main applications to improve the safety of pharmacotherapy. The search was conducted using the Web of Science database for the period 1991-2023. A positive trend in publications in the field of using digital technologies in the management of adverse drug reactions was revealed. A total of 72% of all relevant publications come from the following countries: the USA, China, England, India, and Germany. Among the organizations most active in the field of drug side effect management using digital technologies, American and Chinese universities dominate. Visualization of publication keywords using VOSviewer software 1.6.18 revealed four clusters: "preclinical studies", "clinical trials", "pharmacovigilance", and "reduction of adverse drug reactions in order to improve the patient's quality of life". Molecular design technologies, virtual models for toxicity modeling, data integration, and drug repurposing are among the key digital tools used in the preclinical research phase. Integrating the application of machine learning algorithms for data analysis, monitoring of electronic databases of spontaneous messages, electronic medical records, scientific databases, social networks, and analysis of digital device data into clinical trials and pharmacovigilance systems, can significantly improve the efficiency and safety of drug development, implementation, and monitoring processes. The result of combining all these technologies is a huge synergistic provision of up-to-date and valuable information to healthcare professionals, patients, and health authorities.

Use of #NutritionFacts to promote evidence-based nutrition information: X (formerly Twitter) hashtag analysis study.

Nutrition is a key determinant of health, and the dissemination of reliable nutrition information to consumers is of great importance for public health. Especially with the rise of digital communication technologies and the wide-spread online misinformation, the provision of qualitative science-based information related to diet is of great importance. The NutritionFacts.org has been established as a prominent online source of evidence-based nutrition information. In this work we aimed to investigate the use of the associated hashtag #NutritionFacts on X (formerly Twitter) over a 5 years period, from 10th of April 2018 to 10th of April 2023. The conducted analysis with the use of Symplur Signals revealed that 18,998 tweets mentioning #NutritionFacts were posted by 6,136 X users, generating a total of 50,348,223 impressions (views). Both institutional and individual accounts were broadly participating in the dissemination of #NutritionFacts tweets, and the user location profiling indicated wide international engagement with the hashtag. This work indicates that #NutritionFacts has been established as an important hashtag utilized on X for the dissemination of evidence-based information related to nutrition.