[Telemedicine in the emergency room-An extension with potential? : Results of a recent survey]. / Telemedizin im Schockraum ­ eine Ergänzung mit Potenzial : Ergebnisse einer aktuellen Umfrage.

Critically injured patients pose great challenges for medical personnel in emergency room treatment. How can such a high workload due to a lack of personnel be reduced? Telemedicine can offer solutions here. With the help of external medical expertise, diagnoses and treatment processes are already significantly accelerated and optimized in other specialist areas. This possibility should now also be introduced into the care of critical trauma surgery patients. In this article, current emergency room treatment is reflected, problems are shown and future-oriented solutions are suggested.

Medical Emergency Datasets Can Improve the Comprehensiveness of Handover Information: A Simulation Study.

Background: Access to patients' medical histories can be of vital importance to ensure proper treatment in an emergency. Germany is planning to introduce a medical emergency dataset (MED), accessible through an electronic health card, and comprising important patient information, such as diagnoses, medications, and allergies. Introduction: This article evaluates the effect of MEDs on the comprehensiveness of a physician's documentation and handover process to the emergency department of a hospital. Materials and Methods: In 2 randomized, crossover simulation studies, 72 emergency physicians participated in 2 emergency scenarios, either with or without access to an MED. Subsequently, they had to document the key information (pre-existing conditions, medications, and allergies) and hand it over to a fictional hospital. The influence of the MED on the documentation of key information was analyzed using the two-sided Prescott's exact test. Sensitivity analyses adjusting for scenario were conducted. Results: The results show that in scenarios with an MED, documentation of key information in the handover process was more complete. In the first trial, 2 of 3 key items (pre-existing conditions/information and allergies) presented a statistically noticeable difference in scenarios with the MED. The second trial confirmed these results for all key items. Discussion: The findings indicate that the use of MEDs in emergency care could be beneficial since documentation and handover in scenarios with an MED were superior to current real-world practices. Conclusions: Access to more complete patient information through an MED could help to improve the patient's treatment.