The Department of Emergency Medicine at Henry Ford Hospital provides care for nearly 100,000 patients each year, of which 24 percent are admitted to the hospital. Those admissions account for nearly 44 percent of all hospital admissions. More than 30 senior staff physicians and about 50 resident physicians staff the E.R. with more than 300 nurses and other health care support personnel. Our patient population consists of:
17% critically ill
52% emergent care
19% pediatrics
all others: 12%
Recently, the emergency room underwent an extensive $10 million renovation. The Department has two major resuscitation rooms, a 16-bed critical care area and separate areas for emergency, urgent and pediatric care. The Department has two X-ray suites, two CT scanners and an ultrasound suite - all fully staffed with technicians and radiologists 24 hours a day. In addition, 3 mobile ultrasound machines are present in the department exclusively for emergency physician use in bedside imaging. An onsite pharmacy provides for rapid access and distribution of medications as well as physician consultation. A clinical pharmacist is often present for resuscitations and procedural sedation. Our outstanding Emergency Medicine physician assistants complement our delivery of health care throughout the Department, caring for low acuity patients to allow residents to focus on the higher acuity patients.
The Emergency Department has a computer-based patient tracking system complete with physician order entry (CPOE) for medications, vital signs, imaging, and hospital admission bed requests. All physician and nursing documentation is done electronically without need for dictations. The state-of-the-art radiology and laboratory is completely computerized throughout the system with instant access to current images, laboratory and outpatient or inpatient visit data from any of the Henry Ford Health System facilities.
The Department of Emergency Medicine has led the nation on the development of Early Goal-Directed Therapy and the Surviving Sepsis Campaign. The faculty continues to perform ground-breaking research in sepsis, neuro emergencies, biomarkers, etc. that set standards for patient care across the country.
