Urgent Matters

In the United States, everyone knows that if you call 911, someone will come help you. It's a great system, but anyone who has worked in it knows that not everyone who calls needs the level of emergency care it was intended for. So what should be done with patients who many would label as "abusing" the system?    The city of Houston has taken a novel approach to finding an alternative means of handling these patients so that patients receive the care they need and expensive resources are conserved. It's called ETHAN or Emergency TeleHealth And Navigation. With this, EMTs responding to a 911 call, are able to connect less acute patients with an Emergency Medicine physician via video over the tablets they already carry. The physician then confirms that the patient would be better served with a next-day appointment somewhere other than the hospital's ED, and is able to arrange everything right then. This saves EMS from needing to transport the patient, it saves the ED from needing to treat the patient, and it co