Editor's Note Intermountain Healthcare’s (Salt Lake City, Utah) Partners in Healing program, which involves family members in in-patient care, helped reduce 30-day readmissions after cardiac surgery by 65%, the February 13 Healthcare Finance reports. The program enables family members to help with basic care, which in turn prepares them for…

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Editor's Note In this nationwide French study, bariatric surgery was associated with a significantly higher 6-year postoperative diabetes treatment discontinuation rate, compared with baseline and a control group who did not have bariatric surgery. Of more than 30,000 patients included in the study, the treatment discontinuation rate was 49.9% for…

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Editor's Note The Joint Commission on February 14 announced that the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) has launched a new initiative for US hospitals to complete their attestation when renewing their NPDB registrations. The NPDB is a repository of reports on medical malpractice payments and adverse actions related to healthcare…

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Editor's Note The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) on February 14 authorized marketing of the first blood test to help evaluate concussions in adults and reduce the need for CT scans. The Banyan Brain Trauma Indicator works by measuring levels of proteins (ie, UCH-L1 and GFAP) that are released from…

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Editor's Note Purposeful completion (fidelity) of, more than adherence to, items in the surgical safety checklist diminished intraoperative delays in this study. Of 591 cases analyzed, 110 (19%) had at least one documented intraoperative delay. The majority were related to missing (50%) or malfunctioning (30%) equipment. Degree of fidelity was…

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Editor's Note The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) on February 13 announced that it is permitting the marketing of clinical decision support software that alerts providers to potential strokes in their patients. The Viz.AI Contact application is designed to analyze computed tomography images of the brain and send a text…

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Editor's Note Bringing specially trained dogs into ICUs can safely and substantially ease patients' physical and emotional pain, according to Johns Hopkins researchers. Having seen how successful animal-assisted therapy was in the inpatient rehabilitation unit at Johns Hopkins, the researchers adapted the hospital’s protocol to safely bring dogs to ICU…

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Editor's Note The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) on February 9 classified the recall by Philips Electronics (Andover, Massachusetts) of its HeartStart MRx Defibrillator as Class I, the most serious. The recall was initiated because of micro cracks in the gas discharge tube that allow internal gasses to escape and…

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Editor's Note This analysis of 3 million elective surgical procedures in the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP) found a broad range of procedure-specific intrinsic cardiac adverse event risks associated with 200 commonly performed procedures. A total of 66 low, 30 intermediate, and 106 high…

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Editor's Note Injury scene characteristics are linked to mortality, with odds of death highest for those injured in communities with higher median age or lower per capita income, and located farther from level 1 or 2 trauma centers, this study finds. This study of 16,082 patients found the odds of…

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