There are several options to get into a critical care fellowship. Our hospital has programs for those who completed residencies in anesthesiology, surgery, internal medicine (IM), or emergency medicine (EM).
This post is supposed to be a primer about billing in critical care. I’ll update it regularly as practices change.
It’s important for the intensive care unit (ICU) treatment team to construct and communicate our daily assessment and plan with all relevant parties involved in a patient’s care. We accomplish this during “rounds” each morning with a team usually led by the ICU fellow consisting of the patient’s nurse, an…
I’ll be taking my critical care medicine (CCM) board exam on October 13, 2018 just over three months into my cardiothoracic anesthesiology fellowship. The American Board of Anesthesiology posts a content outline for the CCM exam, so I’m rewriting the outline in a Google Document and basically filling in the…
I’ve finished over three months of my critical care fellowship, and my has the time flown by! I’ve completed items 1 – 7 on my list of rotations and will be starting a two week elective in TEE/imaging tomorrow. It’ll be a nice preview of what I’ll be doing next…
Compared to how I studied for anesthesiology, the topics I’ll cover in critical care will be far different and more in depth. Yes, both fields have overlap in terms of knowledge base (hemodynamic management, mechanical ventilation, pathophysiology, pharmacology, overall acute care topics) and procedural skills (airway management, line placement, etc);…
Prevention of hypoxemia requires a protected, unobstructed airway and adequate ventilation which takes priority over managing all other conditions.
As of yesterday, I’m officially certified in Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) for the next four years! This two day course was required and paid for by my critical care fellowship, so I wanted to summarize some of the pearls I learned.
Procalcitonin (PCT) is a 116 amino acid peptide precursor to calcitonin, a hormone involved in calcium homeostasis. PCT increases significantly in the context of proinflammatory bacterial infections but remains low in viral and other inflammatory states. In serum, PCT rises in 2-4 hours and peaks at 4-30 hours, but interestingly…
The subcostal view on transthoracic echocardiography can be used to examine the inferior vena cava (IVC), a large valveless vein that returns blood from the lower body to the right atrium (RA).