We began developing a Quality Measure Consortium. Development of quality measures is expensive, so we have invited other organizations with registries to jointly develop measures with us and share the cost.

With more than 1,200 emergency departments in 46 states and more than 40,000 clinicians participating, the Emergency Quality (E-QUAL) Network is growing and helping improve patient care for sepsis and chest pain as well as promote avoidance of unnecessary imaging and treatment of opioid use disorder.
We held an ACEP/EMF Data Summit earlier this year to begin developing a plan to build a data analytics platform to enable research with CEDR data for more than 50 million patient visits.

In July, we held a Health Information Technology Summit, bringing together around 100 electronic health record (EHR) vendors, payers, government agencies, and thought leaders. We know your administrative burden is constantly growing; we want to help make EHR systems more efficient and less burdensome for you.

Clinical

We pushed back on an inappropriate policy for sedation promulgated by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, instead producing our own Unscheduled Sedation Policy specific to our specialty. We’re going through the same process for sepsis because the Society of Critical Care Medicine released a sepsis protocol that does not consider the unique nature of emergency medicine.
We got the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and The Joint Commission to clarify that our members are allowed to have food and drink at their ED workstations, and we developed a members-only toolkit to help you educate your administrators about this clarification.

We launched a new members-only emergency medicine Point of Care (emPOC) app.

We produced many opioid-related resources (www.acep.org/opioids), including the ALTO boot camp and the first EM-specific Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) waiver training. We’re doing state MAT waiver trainings with our chapters pursuant to a grant.

Publications

We are developing a second journal that will be open-access and online only and selected Henry E. Wang, MD, MS, to be its new Editor in Chief. The first issue is planned for February 2020.

We hired a new medical Editor in Chief for ACEP Now, Jeremy Faust, MD, MS, MA, after former medical Editor in Chief Kevin Klauer, DO, EJD, FACEP, accepted a new role as CEO of the American Osteopathic Association.

Workforce Studies

ACEP is taking on two important and complex situations affecting emergency medicine. The Nurse Practitioner/Physician Assistant Utilization Task Force will help us provide leadership on the scope of practice and appropriate protocols for use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants in the emergency department. The delivery of health care is changing with freestanding emergency departments, the growth of urgent care centers, telemedicine, and the consolidation and employment of emergency physicians. The Emergency Medicine Workforce Task Force will help us better understand the current ED workforce environment and predict future needs.

Workplace Violence Initiative

ACEP is launching a new Campaign to End Workplace Violence in the ED with the Emergency Nurses Association (ENA) this fall. This will be a robust collaboration with different resources and deliverables examining all sides of this problem. We’re already working with ENA on the federal Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act and are encouraging our chapters to collaborate at the state level.

Accreditation Programs

The Geriatric ED Accreditation Program is growing. More than 60 hospitals are accredited, including one in Spain, and we have more than 100 in the pipeline. We’ve agreed to accredit 20 VA hospitals next year to help improve care of our veterans.