Editor's Note For diabetic patients with obesity and chronic kidney disease (CKD), metabolic bariatric surgery could protect the kidneys better than therapy with glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RA), according to research published in the September issue of the Annals of Surgery. Conducted at a large US health system, the study…

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Editor's Note Optimizing patient positioning can help reduce the risk of surgical site infections due to airborne contaminants in positive-pressure ORs, according to a study published August 12 in Nature: Scientific Reports. Maintaining higher pressure than adjacent spaces prevents entry of contaminants from environments external to the OR. For this…

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Editor's Note The Red Cross is reporting a 25-percent drop in its national blood inventory due to hot weather a month after the American Hospital Association (AHA) warned about the impact of cyberattacks on critical supplies at hospitals. According to an August 6 report in The Hill, heat-related challenges have…

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Editor's Note A study published August 6 in the journal Surgery highlights the impact of structured debriefing tools on improving communication and patient safety in the OR during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conducted over three years, the study implemented a new electronic health record (EHR) module to document surgical debriefings and…

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Editor's Note The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) designated recalls of Medtronic’s NIM Vital Nerve Monitoring System and Smith Medical’s CADD-Solis Ambulatory Infusion Pumps as Class 1, the most severe category indicating serious risk of injury or death. Reports of false negative responses prompted Medtronic to recall the nerve…

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Editor's Note An electronic health record (EHR)-based nudge could significantly reduce low-value axillary surgeries in older women with early-stage breast cancer, researchers reported July 17 in JAMA Surgery. Conducted across eight clinical settings, the initiative significantly cut the rates of low-value sentinel lymph node biopsies (SLNB) by nearly 50% over…

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Editor's Note Responding to and recovering from data breaches in healthcare is more expensive than any other industry, according to a report by IBM and the Ponemon Institute. Healthcare Dive reported on the results August 1. According to that article, the $9.8 million average cost for a breach this year…

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Editor's Note Automated surgical video analysis could enhance evaluation of an OR team’s nontechnical skills, according to a study published July 31 in JAMA Network Open. Conducted between January 2021 and May 2022, the cross-sectional study involved 30 cardiovascular surgical teams at a teaching hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Using OpenPose,…

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Editor's Note Hospitals and health systems have largely returned to normal operations in the wake of a global IT outage caused by a faulty update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, according to a July 29 article in Becker’s Health IT. The outage, which began July 18, resulted in many health systems'…

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Some 800,000 knee replacements and 550,000 hip replacements are performed in the US each year. Factoring in the ever-expanding aging population, projections show the figure for knee replacements alone will explode to 3.5 million procedures being done annually by 2030—and that is just one type of procedure within a single…

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