A Systematic Review of Racial Disparities in Emergency Department Pain Evaluation and Treatment in the United States

Background: Providers working in emergency departments (ED) must balance the need to relieve patients’ pain with the dangers of overprescribing opioids. Lack of standardization of pain evaluation and treatment may contribute to inequities in the management of pain in emergency departments. Evaluating differences in how different populations receive care in emergency departments can help to identify problems and areas where improvements need to occur. Purpose: The purpose of this literature review is to evaluate what current research states about the prevalence and causes of racial disparities in pain evaluation and treatment in United States emergency departments and determine what gaps in knowledge are a priority for future research. Methods: A literature review was conducted using the Augsburg University library search engine and PubMed. Exclusion criteria were any articles published prior to 2020, any articles discussing hospitals outside the United States, systematic reviews, and articles which did not discuss racial disparities in pain evaluation or treatment. Conclusions: Many patient populations, such as Black, Hispanic and Native American patients, experience lowered rates of opioid prescription for pain in emergency departments across the United States. Racial disparities in the evaluation and treatment of chest pain are also widespread. Pediatric patients presenting with pain also experience racial disparities in rates of opioid prescription and imaging studies ordered. More research needs to be done into the efficacy of trainings and policy implementation to reduce these inequities

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Increasing Education Research Productivity: A Network Analysis

Introduction: Forming effective networks is important for personal productivity and career development. Although critical for success, these networks are not well understood. The objective of this study was to usze a social network analysis tool to demonstrate the growth of institutional publication networks for education researchers and show how a single institution has expanded its publication network over time.Methods: Publications from a single institution’s medical education research group (MERG) were pulled since its inception in 2010 to 2019 using Web of Science to collect publication information. Using VOSViewer software, we formed and plotted a network sociogram comparing the first five years to the most recent 4.25 years to compare the institutions of authors from peer reviewed manuscripts published by this group.Results: We found 104 peer-reviewed research articles, editorials, abstracts, and reviews for the MERG authors between 2010 and 2019 involving 134 unique institutions. During 2010-2014, there were 26 publications involving 56 institutions. From 2015- 2019, there were 78 publications involving 116 unique institutions.Conclusion: This brief report correlates successful research productivity in medical education with the presence of increased inter-institutional collaborations as demonstrated by network sociograms.  Programs to intentionally expand collaborative networks may prove to be an important element of facilitating successful careers in medical education scholarship