A roadmap for developing an emergency department based critical care consultation service: Building the early intervention team (EIT).

Emergency Department (ED) crowding and boarding impact safe and effective health care delivery. ED clinicians must balance caring for new arrivals who require stabilization and resuscitation as well as those who need longitudinal care and re-evaluation. These challenges are magnified in the setting of critically ill patients boarding for the intensive care unit. Boarding is a complex issue that has multiple solutions based on resources at individual institutions. Several different models have been described for delivery of critical care in the ED. Here, we describe the development of an ED based critical care consultation service, the early intervention team, at an urban academic ED.

Acoustic effects of non-transparent and transparent face coverings.

The widespread use of face coverings during the COVID-19 pandemic has created communication challenges for many individuals, particularly for those who are deaf or hard of hearing and for those who must speak through masks in suboptimal conditions. This study includes some newer mask options as well as transparent masks to help those who depend on lipreading and other facial cues. The results corroborate earlier published results for non-transparent masks, but transparent options have greater attenuation, resonant peaks, and deflect sounds in ways that non-transparent masks do not. Although transparent face coverings have poorer acoustic performance, the presence of visual cues remains important for both verbal and non-verbal communication. Fortunately, there are creative solutions and technologies available to overcome audio and/or visual barriers caused by face coverings.

Perceptions of campus authorities: Institutional responses, fairness, and bystander action.

Objective: This study is an examination of college students' bystander behaviors in relation to several exosystem factors related to their institution, including trust in their college's support systems, perceived procedural justice by campus police, and perceived procedural justice by campus administrators. Participants: Online surveys were completed by 223 students at a mid-sized public institution in the Northeastern U.S. Methods: Responses were analyzed using an OLS multiple regression to examine bystander behaviors in relation to their perceptions of institutional exosystem factors. Results: Students who felt more favorably about both campus police and campus admin were more likely to have intervened in the past as a bystander; trust in school had no effect. Conclusions: Perceptions of institutional leaders and representatives are important to consider as influential motivators for bystander behavior. School personnel trainings and policies which increase visibility of staff as trustworthy and fair should be part of comprehensive campus antiviolence efforts.

VarStack: a web tool for data retrieval to interpret somatic variants in cancer.

Advances in tumor genome sequencing created an urgent need for bioinformatics tools to support the interpretation of the clinical significance of the variants detected. VarStack is a web tool which is a base to retrieve somatic variant data relating to cancer from existing databases. VarStack incorporates data from several publicly available databases and presents them with an easy-to-navigate user interface. It currently supports data from the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer, gnomAD, cBioPortal, ClinVar, OncoKB, CiViC and UCSC Genome Browser. It retrieves the data from these databases and returns them back to the user in a fraction of the time it would take to manually navigate each site independently. Users submit a variant with a gene symbol, peptide change and coding sequence change. They may select a variety of tumor-specific studies in cBioPortal to search through in addition to their original query. The results from the databases are presented in tabs. Users can export the results as an Excel file. VarStack also has the batch search feature in which the user can submit a list of variants and download an Excel file with the data from the databases. With the batch search and data download options, users can easily incorporate VarStack into their workflow or tools. VarStack saves time by providing somatic variant information to the user from multiple databases in an easy-to-export and interpretable format. VarStack is freely available under https://varstack.brown.edu.