There's a set of decisions that you have to make right off the bat, which is am I really

worried about this person or not?

Sometimes it's obvious if they're unconscious, if they're vital signs are completely abnormal,

but a lot of the things that we worry about the most in the emergency department are things

that can actually look pretty subtle at first.

Dr. Ziat Obermeyer is an emergency medicine physician and a professor at UC Berkeley.

So everyone's first image of a heart attack is a middle-aged man clutching his chest

and saying something about an elephant, but most heart attacks don't look like that.

Most heart attacks are a little bit of nausea or a tinge of chest pressure.

The stakes are high in the emergency department.

People arrive with symptoms that could be life-threatening or benign or anywhere in between.

There's approximately billions of tests and combinations of tests that you could order

for any given patient, so you need to narrow down to the ones that are going to help you

figure out what to do with this person right now.

A lot of Ziat's research is focused on tests and how to make sure we're testing the right

people for the right things at the right time to get the right information.

In emergency medicine, that means making choices that help you answer one big question.

How do I do with this person next?

Do I bring them into the hospital or do I send them home?

And that's a really hard one.

In 2020, there were more than 33 million hospital admissions in the US.

That number is down slightly from prior years, probably because of the pandemic.

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