Editor's Note The US News & World Report on June 26 announced the 2018-2019 Best Children’s Hospitals rankings. Ten hospitals earned a place on the Honor Roll, which awards hospitals that deliver exceptionally high quality care across multiple specialties: Boston Children’s Hospital Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center Children’s Hospital of…

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Editor's Note Malnourished hospitalized surgical and medical patients who participated in a nutrition quality improvement (QI) program had improved readmission rates and length of stay (LOS), but surgical patients had a significantly greater reduction in readmissions than medical patients, in this study. Of 1,269 patients analyzed, 288 were surgical patients…

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Editor's Note Robot-assisted and open cystectomies are equally effective in treating bladder cancer, this 7-year study finds. Conducted at 17 institutions, 350 patients with bladder cancer were randomized to the open (175 patients) or the robot-assisted (175 patients) surgical approach. The researchers found lower blood loss and transfusion rates and…

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Editor's Note This retrospective study of patients undergoing bariatric surgery found that hospitals with the largest reductions in serious postoperative complications had the greatest decrease in Medicare payments. Researchers ranked 562 hospitals (37,329 patients) into quintiles. The top 20% of hospitals had a decrease in average serious complication rate of…

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Editor's Note The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced on June 12 that it would postpone the planned July update to its overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings. CMS says the delay will allow time for more analysis of the effects of changes made to some of the measures…

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Editor's Note In this study, the use of radial-artery grafts for coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) resulted in a lower rate of cardiac adverse events and a higher rate of patency at 5 years than saphenous-vein grafts. A total of 1,036 patients (534 radial artery, 502 saphenous vein) from six…

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The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) has released a sterilization standard on quality management for central service (CS) sterile processing. The new standard, ANSI/AAMI ST90: 2017 Processing of Health Care Products: Quality Management Systems for Processing in Health Care Facilities, provides guidelines to support quality management systems…

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Editor's Note A change of policy to allow the practice of overlapping surgery for urgent neurosurgical procedures in a tertiary care, safety-net hospital significantly reduced length of stay, in this study presented May 1 at the American Association of Neurological Surgeons in New Orleans. Of 452 cases analyzed (201 in…

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Editor's Note The submission deadline for all Ambulatory Surgery Center Quality Reporting (ASCQR) program web-based measures is May 15, 2018, the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association reported on April 24. ASC-8: Influenza Vaccination Coverage among Healthcare Personnel is reported through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Healthcare Safety Network.…

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Editor's Note One-third of postoperative readmissions are unlikely to reflect problems with surgical quality, this study finds. Readmissions with diagnoses that were considered associated with surgical quality accounted for 25,521 of 39,664 readmissions (64%) at a VA medical center between October 1, 2007 and September 30, 2014. The proportion of…

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