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March 10, 2023

The Role of an ED Observation Unit - Part 6 of 7

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- Welcome to MicroED, Quick Facts for Big Issues. My name is Salim Rezaie, community ER doc in San Antonio, Texas. This is part six of a seven part series on Atrial Fibrillation, the Role of an ED Observation Unit. Now, this is gonna be dependent on where you work, what consultants you have available, and what tests you have available. So let me just start with that, but I think this is a great option for patients who don't have good follow up or who lack insurance. There are so many things that we can do during this 24-hour period. Also, this is amenable to that wait and see approach, where many patients will just convert on their own. This can reduce unnecessary hospital admissions, return visits to the emergency department, adverse events. It can improve cost and quality of care. And remember, in part one, we talked about reversible causes? This is a great time to start doing that differential and looking for those reversible causes. And the last part of this is we can use a multidisciplinary team approach, specifically with cardiology, to help us make those decisions on anticoagulation, and we'll talk about that a little bit more in part seven. Well, thank you for tuning in. I hope you found that helpful, and stay tuned for part seven, where we'll talk about determining needs for anticoagulation.

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