Editor's Note The patient’s clinical condition responsible for admission, age, comorbidities, and socioeconomic factors such as race, income, and payer status were strong predictors of readmission within 30 days in this study. The analysis included some 15 million patients at 611 hospitals from Premier healthcare alliance over a 2-year period.…

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Editor's Note The Joint Commission on March 21 approved a new National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) on catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) for accredited nursing care centers. Also approved were revisions for the existing CAUTI NPSG for accredited hospitals and critical access hospitals, which were made to bring the NPSG…

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Editor's Note In this analysis of Medicare patients undergoing colectomy at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, payments under the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Initiative were lower than traditional fee-for-service payments, and the proportion of patients contributing to a net negative margin increased. Of 821 patients analyzed, 33.7% contributed to an overall…

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Editor's Note The US District Court for the District of Columbia has given the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) another month to issue a final notice justifying cutting inpatient payments by 0.2% in conjunction with its “two-midnight” rule, The March 18 AHA News Now reports. CMS has until…

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Editor's Note The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on March 18 announced the Class I recall of the GlideScope Titanium Single-Use Video Laryngoscope by Verathon (Bothell, Washington). Class I is the most serious. The recall was initiated because of a potential disruption in the video feed from the laryngoscope blade…

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Editor's Note In this study of Michigan hospitals, overall complications in laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy patients varied widely, and serious complications were infrequent. The analysis included 8,693 patients who underwent laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy from 2013 to 2014 in 40 hospitals in the Michigan Bariatric Surgery Collaborative. Overall, 5.4% experienced complications, and…

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Editor's Note In this work system analysis, the inclusion of prefilled syringes into medication delivery by anesthesia providers simplified work processes and reduced the number and associated risks of system vulnerabilities. Eight system vulnerabilities were found in the prefilled syringe system versus 21 in the self-filled syringe system. An example…

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Editor's Note ECRI Institute announced on March 17 that is collaborating with the London School of  Economics in a project examining medical device pricing across different countries. Medical devices are estimated to account for 6% to 7% of total health expenditure in the US and European countries, but little is…

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Editor's Note Emergency general surgery patients who were managed early in the academic year with an influx of new residents fared equally well, if not better, than patients who were managed later in the year in this study. Compared to patients managed later, early patients had lower risk-adjusted odds of…

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Editor's Note This study was designed to understand nurses’ perceptions of using an electronic health record (EHR) at the point of care. At 1 year after EHR adoption, the nurses said: it did not improve patient care the learning curve was steep they had lower confidence using the EHR than…

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