Editor's Note The Joint Commission on October 7 issued a new Quick Safety that focuses on the use of telehealth to deliver patient care while preventing exposure to COVID-19. Other benefits of telehealth in the Quick Safety include: promoting social distancing monitoring the progression of home-quarantined COVID-19 patients enabling providers…

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Editor's Note Leandro Pecchia, PhD, associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, has been awarded £13 million (nearly $17 million) for the ODIN project. The project will explore the use of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) to ease pressures on hospitals during recovery from COVID-19…

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Editor's Note The Joint Commission on September 30 announced a revision to its Environment of Care (EC) standard EC.02.04.03, element of performance (EP) 34, which will take effect January 1, 2021, for ambulatory care organizations, office based surgery practices, hospitals, and critical access hospitals. The Joint Commission has determined that…

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Editor's Note This study from the University of California, San Diego; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; and Institute for Disease Modeling, Bellevue, Washington, finds that acute anxiety spiked early during the COVID-19 pandemic but has since returned to typical levels. Researches examined internet searchers indicative of acute anxiety that originated from…

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Editor's Note In an August 17 news release, the ECRI Institute and its affiliate, the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP), announced that they had launched a new Patient Safety Organization (PSO). The PSO is an important step in making medication, medical devices, and healthcare practices safer for patients across…

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Editor's Note The use of an automated web-based symptom monitoring tool as part of Maine's COVID-19 contact tracing program made the state's contact tracing and monitoring faster and more efficient. The tool was well received, with the majority of monitored contacts (96.4%) agreeing to the automated system. Contacts automatically received…

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Editor's Note The Curial AI test, an artificial intelligence (AI) program developed at the University of Oxford, UK, can identify COVID-19 within 1 hour of a patient arriving at an emergency department (ED), the July 31 Belfast Telegraph reports. The AI test analyzes patient data, such as blood tests and…

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Orthopedic implants comprise a significant percentage of an OR’s costs, so effectively managing contracts for these items can help OR leaders in hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) bolster the bottom lines of their organizations. “The contract is your best mechanism to control the influx of non-anticipated items, resolve overcharges,…

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On January 1, 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) began reimbursing healthcare providers for total hip arthroplasty performed in outpatient hospital settings and total knee arthroplasty in ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs), thereby opening the floodgates for explosive growth in outpatient total joint arthroplasty (TJA). About a million…

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Editor's Note The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on July 20 launched a new Data Hub for COVID-19 hospitalization data that officials say provides a more comprehensive view of the pandemic than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) National Healthcare Safety Network, where the information…

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