Perhaps the most underappreciated benefit of point-of-care EEG is its ability to keep appropriate patients close to home. Community hospitals do not need to become tertiary neuroscience centers, but they do need tools that allow them to answer urgent neurologic questions locally when possible. If EEG can be obtained promptly in the ED, interpreted with sufficient confidence, and paired with specialists’ remote review, some patients who once would have been transferred for diagnosis alone may remain in their community hospital for treatment. That reduces system burden and preserves higher-level referral resources for the patients who truly need them.

Point-of-care EEG should not be viewed as a replacement for conventional EEG, and the available systems are not interchangeable. But the direction is clear: EEG is moving toward the bedside because emergency care increasingly needs it there. The old model often forced transfer simply to obtain a diagnosis, and even then, the answer was not always delivered quickly. Point-of-care EEG changes that equation by allowing the ED to ask an urgent neurologic question sooner, answer it closer to home, and reserve transfer for the patients who truly need higher-level care.

Author Disclaimer: We use a Zeto system at our hospital and, as an early adopter of their technology, have a professional relationship and have helped them further develop the product to better fit with our specific needs. Zeto did fly me out to a critical care conference in Chicago earlier this year to talk about our experience with the product in the ER, however, I did not receive any income for doing so.

Dr. Syrett is chief medical officer and emergency physician at the Auburn Community Hospital in Auburn, N.Y.