“Number needed to treat” may not be a concept all physicians are familiar with, but by the time most leave the Wednesday session “Number Needed to Treat: Pinpointing ED Interventions That Matter Most,” many will feel like they were just let in on a dirty secret—in a great way.

“Number needed to treat is a way of seeing the efficacy and understanding the facility of a health care intervention,” said session speaker David H. Newman, MD, FACEP, director of clinical research in the department of emergency medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai in New York City. “It’s literally just repackaging data so that it’s digestible and understandable.”

It is an attempt, he said, to reimagine data in a patient-, physician-, and bedside-friendly way. His session is intended to give emergency physicians a toolkit for assessing interventions and provide them an easy-to-use evidence-based guide for making critical decisions in the emergency department.

“Number needed to treat is a way of seeing the efficacy and understanding the facility of a health care intervention. It’s literally just repackaging data so that it’s digestible and understandable.” —Dr. Newman

“In the ED, we are dealing with economies of care: which room should we go in first to have the most impact, and what do we do first to ensure the most impact in the time we have?” said Dr. Newman. “When you know number needed to treat, it allows a standardized way of comparing across interventions to decide where to spend your time.”

Kelly Tyrrell is a health, science, and health policy writer based in Madison, Wisconsin.

Dr. Newman

Number Needed to Treat: Pinpointing ED Interventions That Matter Most

Wednesday, Oct. 28
3:30–4:20 p.m.
Room 258 ABC