Editor's Note The Joint Commission on March 8 announced that it has approved new and revised requirements for hospitals and critical access hospitals certified under the Patient Blood Management Certification program, effective July 1. The requirements have been updated to maintain alignment with the Association for the Advancement of Blood…

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Editor's Note This German study finds that extension of the currently recommended 10-year screening colonoscopy intervals may be warranted, especially for female and younger participants without gastrointestinal symptoms. Data on 1.25 million individuals in the German screening colonoscopy registry, the world’s largest registry of its kind, were analyzed. A total…

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Editor's Note This study, presented March 7 at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) annual meeting in Las Vegas, finds high reported satisfaction and outcomes in patients who had outpatient joint arthroplasty procedures in academic medical centers. The study included 281 outpatient total joint arthroplasty (TJA) and unicondylar knee…

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Editor's Note The Joint Commission on March 1 announced a revision to Performance Improvement (PI) standard PI:01.01.01, Element of Performance (EP) 4, which has to do with data collection on significant discrepancies between preoperative and postoperative diagnoses. The revision was made after healthcare organizations expressed confusion with the requirement. The…

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Editor's Note This study from the Mayo Clinic finds that despite calls for the expansion of outpatient surgery to mitigate the growing backlog of surgical cases during COVID-19, the transition of general surgery procedures from inpatient to outpatient settings occurred in only a small subset of procedures. This cohort study…

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Editor's Note The Joint Commission on March 1 announced that updated Accelerate PI Dashboard Reports, which provide performance measurement data on certain quality measures, are available for hospitals (HAPs), critical access hospitals (CAHs), ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), and nursing care centers (NCCs). ASC reports contain data through the fourth quarter…

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Editor's Note Researchers at Mayo Clinic Healthcare in London are investigating how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to identify colon polyps that might otherwise get overlooked during colonoscopy. The AI system works alongside the physician in real time, scanning the colonoscopy video feed and drawing small, red boxes around…

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Editor's Note This study by researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, finds that preoperative surgeon intuition is an independent predictor of postoperative complications, but it isn’t as strong as the predictive power of the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS-NSQIP)…

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Editor's Note A recent Health Day-Harris Poll online survey finds that 63% of nurse and physician respondents are experiencing moderate or severe burnout at work, the February 23 Health Day News reports. Other findings include: 66% of physicians and 75% of nurses cite understaffing as the main contributor to burnout…

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Editor's Note This study from the University of Pittsburgh finds that preoperative frailty screening was associated with significantly reduced 1-year postoperative mortality. A total of 50,463 patients (22,722 before implementation of a frailty assessment initiative and 27,741 after implementation) with at least 1-year of postoperative follow-up were included in the…

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