Can Tattoos Accurately Measure Blood Pressure?
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University have created an electronic tattoo that can be worn on the wrist comfortably for hours while providing accurate, continuous blood pressure measurements.
UC Davis Offers Free Online Course to Help Clinicians Prevent Firearm Injuries
The course explains how to have conversations with patients who have access to firearms and may be at risk of interpersonal violence, unintentional injury, or suicide, or unintentional injury, according to UC Davis. It also teaches clinicians how to intervene based on the type and level of risk of firearm violence.
Rural Hospitals Use New Technology to Efficiently Manage Beds and Transfers
At Rice County District Hospital in Lyons, Kansas, staff are using patient placement technology to coordinate care for both patients inside the 25-bed, level 4 hospital, and those needing to be transferred to another facility. The platform integrates local EMS and other transport services, such as helicopters and planes, with health systems hundreds of miles away who have the specialists necessary to treat a critically injured patient.
Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute Supports 26 New Studies
The $258 million in funding was announced by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). The institute also announced an additional $3.9 million for two projects to promote wider and faster clinical adoption of useful findings from completed PCORI clinical effectiveness research (CER) studies.
Leapfrog Makes Recommendations to Reduce Diagnostic Errors at Hospitals
Leapfrog, which is a nonprofit organization founded in 2000 to promote patient safety, identified 300 potential practices that hospitals could adopt to reduce diagnostic errors. The potential practices were pared down to a list of 29 recommended practices in two categories— Organizational Leadership & Systems and the Diagnostic Process. There are 16 recommendations in the Organizational Leadership & Systems category and 13 recommendations in the Diagnostic Process category.
Using Technology to Improve Observation Rates and Drive Appropriate Admissions
The suburban Philadelphia healthcare network, centered around an independent 270-bed hospital, is using predictive analytics technology from XSOLIS to improve medical utilization management. In the first six months of use, officials say they’ve improved observation rates by 20% and observation to inpatient conversion rates by 37%. And three years later, the initial return on investment of 4.6x has now improved to 7.3x.
AMA Survey Cites Patient Concerns With Data Security
Almost 75% of those surveyed are concerned about protecting the privacy of personal health data. Only 20% of patients said they know how many companies and individuals have access to their data. The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling over abortion rights is heightening these concerns, the AMA says, since a lack of data privacy may put patients and physicians in legal jeopardy where states are restricting reproductive health services.
Establish Monkeypox Infection Control Team, Monitor Community Outbreaks
The World Health Organization declared the contagion a global health emergency July 23 and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said the declaration “is a call to action for the global health community,” and that his agency and others will be accelerating plans to make “to make vaccines, testing, and treatments available to people in need.”
CMS Revises Methodology for Calculating Staffing Star Rating
These measures, which have been posted on the CMS website for more than a decade, are used to calculate each nursing home’s star rating for the staffing section of the Nursing Home Five-Star Quality Rating System.
Researchers Find Decreased In-Hospital Adverse Events from 2010 to 2019
The new research article, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is based on data collected from more than 244,000 adult patients hospitalized in 3,256 hospitals from 2010 to 2019.