Teaching hospitals with a higher intensity of physician-training activity achieve lower mortality rates, but higher hospitalization readmission rates, for key medical diagnoses, reports a study in the July issue of the journal Medical Care.

(more…)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is recommending that healthcare facilities take steps to assure that appropriate safeguards are in place to reduce the risk of failure due to cyberattack. This could be initiated by the introduction of malware into the medical equipment or unauthorized access to configuration settings in medical devices and hospital networks.

(more…)

An abstract presented at the 2013 EULAR Conference suggests that patients with mild arthritis of the spine who take certain drugs known as tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) blocking agents may be able to reduce their doses over time without a substantive loss of clinical effectiveness.

(more…)

On June 13, 2013, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved denosumab (Xgeva injection; Amgen Inc.) for the treatment of adults and skeletally mature adolescents with giant cell tumor of bone that is unresectable or where surgical resection is likely to result in severe morbidity. These tumors are typically not malignant but can be destructive to bones.

(more…)

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has determined that it will pay for up to three scans using¹⁸F-fluorodeoxyglucose-enhanced positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) technology when the scans are used for planning cancer treatments, including prostate cancer.

(more…)

June 12, 2013, is National Time Out Day, created by the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) in 2004. Time Out Day was initiated as a way to raise awareness about the importance of requiring the entire surgical team to take a “time out” before all invasive procedures to communicate as a group and confirm key information about the patient and procedure to help prevent errors from occurring. This has been reinforced by the updated Joint Commission sentinel events list, which now cites “wrong patient, wrong site, wrong procedure” as the second most frequent sentinel event of 2012.

(more…)

In a small, single-center clinical trial, researchers have found that using stress cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging in an Emergency Department (ED) observation unit to care for patients with acute chest pain is a benefit to both the patient and the institution.

(more…)

According to a study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, universal decolonization in the intensive care unit (ICU) reduced the incidence of positive MRSA cultures by 37% and decreased bloodstream infections from any pathogen by 44%.

(more…)

A study by researchers at the Boston University Medical Center suggests that I COUGH, a standardized postoperative care program emphasizing patient education, early mobilization, and pulmonary interventions, is associated with a reduced risk of postoperative pneumonia and unplanned intubation.

(more…)

The American Academy of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery Foundation has published a new Clinical Practice Guideline on “Improving Voice Outcomes after Thyroid Surgery” to recognize the importance of the patient’s voice and the potential impact thyroid surgery can have on it.

(more…)