Here is a quick look at articles published in the April Annals of Emergency Medicine. Visit www.annemergmed.com to read the full text.

Presence of Outcome Bias in Emergency Physician Judgments of the Quality of Care

By Schriger, et al.

• What is already known on this topic: Physicians often review the care of others to address quality or legal concerns, sometimes with knowledge of the outcome.
• What question this study addressed: Does knowledge of an outcome alter the judgment of care quality by emergency physicians?
• What this study adds to our knowledge: With 587 emergency physician responses to a structured survey of common ED scenarios, knowledge of the outcome affected judgment of quality when the care was ambiguous in quality; this effect vanished when care was clearly good or bad.
• How this is relevant to clinical practice: Caution is needed when deploying peer review in settings where quality of care hovers near thresholds of acceptability.

Serious Injuries Related to the Segway® Personal Transporter: A Case Series

By McKay, et al.

• What is already known on this topic: All forms of motor vehicles are linked with injuries.
• What question this study addressed: This case series describes injuries in 41 patients using a Segway.
• What this study adds to our knowledge: Of patients seeking emergency care following injuries riding personal transporters, 24% were admitted; 40% of these were admitted to the ICU for neurologic observation.
• How this is relevant to clinical practice: It might be worth tracking injuries related to personal transporters with a specific E-Code.