Primary care follow up of patients discharged from the emergency department: a retrospective study

BACKGROUND: The visit to the emergency department (ED) constitutes a brief, yet an important point in the continuum of medical care. The aim of our study was to evaluate the continuity of care of adult ED visitors. METHODS: We retrospectively reviewed all ED discharge summaries for over a month 's period. The ED chart, referral letter and the patient's primary care file were reviewed. Data collected included: age, gender, date and hour of ED visit, documentation of ED referral and ED discharge letter in the primary care file. RESULTS: 359 visits were eligible for the study. 192 (53.5%) of the patients were women, average age 54.1 ± 18.7 years (mean ± SD). 214 (59.6%) of the visits were during working hours of primary care clinics ("working hours"), while the rest were "out of hours" visits. Only 196 (54.6%) of patients had a referral letter, usually from their family physician. A third (71/214) of "working hours" visits were self referrals, the rate rose to 63.5% (92/145) of "out of hours" visits (p < 0.0001). The ED discharge letter was found in 50% (179/359) of the primary care files. A follow-up visit was documented in only 31% (111/359). Neither follow up visit nor discharge letter were found in 43% of the files (153/359). CONCLUSIONS: We have found a high rate of ED self referrals throughout the day together with low documentation rates of ED visits in the primary care charts. Our findings point to a poor continuity of care of ED attendees

Model Based Pose Estimation of Articulated and Constrained Objects

. This paper presents a method for localization of modeled objects that is general enough to cover articulated and other types of constrained models. The flexibility between components of the model are expressed as spatial constraints which are fused into the pose estimation process. The constraint fusion assists in obtaining a precise and stable pose of each object&apos;s component and in finding the correct interpretation. The proposed method can handle any constraint (including inequalities) between any number of different components of the model. The framework is based on Kalman filtering. 1 Introduction Estimating the pose of a 3D object from images or other sensed data is a classical problem in computer vision. Quite often, a model of the object is known and this information is used to estimate the pose of the object in the world. This problem is known as model-based pose determination and is used in many applications such as object recognition, object tracking, robot navigation, mot..

Characterization of right-handed and left-handed shapes

Many natural shapes are chiral (or handed). Our hands, for example, have a right-hand version and a left-hand version, the two types being mirror images of each other. Molecules are also classified according to their chirality, which determines their chemical characteristics. Glucose, for example, is sweet only in one chirality, while it is tasteless in the other. The notion of chirality for two dimensional binary shapes is studied, and scales for quantitative assessment of the degree of shape-chirality are developed. The chirality measures are based on boundary analysis, and perfom well on shapes with natural variations, scaling differences or digitization errors. The measures can also be used with partially occluded shapes, and provide indications on the change of chirality as resolution changes