We're Bad at Death. Can We Talk?

We're Bad at Death. Can We Talk?

Despite growing recognition that more care isn't necessarily better care, particularly at the end of life, many Americans still receive an enormous dose of medicine in their final days. On average, patients make 29 visits... read more

Obese Have Less Respiratory Insufficiency Than Nonobese During Endoscopy

Obese Have Less Respiratory Insufficiency Than Nonobese During Endoscopy

Obese patients showed less respiratory insufficiency (RI) than their nonobese counterparts during endoscopic surgery, according to a new study. The result was counterintuitive. Because of their higher rates of obstructive... read more

Toolkit To Improve Safety in Ambulatory Surgery Centers

Toolkit To Improve Safety in Ambulatory Surgery Centers

The Toolkit To Improve Safety in Ambulatory Surgery Centers helps ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) make care safer for their patients. ASCs can use the toolkit to apply the proven principles and methods of AHRQ's Comprehensive... read more

Happy 100th Anniversary to the RSNA

Happy 100th Anniversary to the RSNA

This week the Radiological Society of North America, a.k.a. RSNA, is holding its annual meeting in Chicago. RSNA is an international society of radiologists, medical physicists and other medical professionals with more than... read more

Jimmy Kimmel Reveals Details of His Son’s Birth & Heart Disease

Jimmy Kimmel Reveals Details of His Son’s Birth & Heart Disease

Jimmy and his wife Molly welcomed their second child together, William "Billy" Kimmel. At three days old, Billy had successful open heart surgery at Children's Hospital Los Angeles and is now home with his family.... read more

Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project: How do ER surgeons avoid dumb, deadly mistakes? Ask their doctor

Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project: How do ER surgeons avoid dumb, deadly mistakes? Ask their doctor

In an excerpt from his new book Michael Lewis examines a Toronto doctor who helps trauma surgeons avoid errors in judgment when life and death are on the line. Doctors tended to see only what they were trained to see: That... read more

Micro-Hospitals Provide Health Care Closer to Home

Micro-Hospitals Provide Health Care Closer to Home

Small-scale inpatient facilities, known in the industry as micro-hospitals, are popping up across the country to offer medical care in underserved communities and provide provide a local alternative to the potentially long... read more

Use of Patient-Generated Wound Data to Improve Postdischarge SSI Monitoring

Use of Patient-Generated Wound Data to Improve Postdischarge SSI Monitoring

The use of mobile health (mHealth) to convey patient-generated health data (PGHD) offers new enhancements and challenges to the provision of surgical care. The Mobile Post-Operative Wound Evaluator (mPOWEr) is a patient-centered... read more

The effect of day of the week on short- and long-term mortality for emergency general surgery

The effect of day of the week on short- and long-term mortality for emergency general surgery

The effect of day of the week on outcome after surgery is the subject of debate. The aim was to determine whether day of the week of emergency general surgery alters short- and long-term mortality. Dr Mike Gillies and... read more

Comparison of Alveolar Recruitment Strategies for Preventing Postoperative Pulmonary Complications

Comparison of Alveolar Recruitment Strategies for Preventing Postoperative Pulmonary Complications

This randomized clinical trial compares the effects of adding an intensive vs moderate alveolar recruitment strategy to protective ventilation on the number and severity of pulmonary complications following cardiac surgery.... read more

Intraoperative Oxidative Stress Associated With Postoperative Delirium

Intraoperative Oxidative Stress Associated With Postoperative Delirium

Intraoperative oxidative stress is associated with postoperative delirium in ICU patients after cardiac surgery, a study has found. Researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in Nashville, Tenn., came to this... read more

The Sick and the Dead: Evidence-Based Trauma Resuscitation

The Sick and the Dead: Evidence-Based Trauma Resuscitation

The science of trauma resuscitation has undergone a fairly massive evolution in the past decade. This talk was our attempt to summarize the best-of-the-best in trauma literature from the past several years, and package it... read more

Implementation of a Clinical Documentation Improvement Curriculum Improves Quality Metrics

Implementation of a Clinical Documentation Improvement Curriculum Improves Quality Metrics

Clinical documentation improvement/ICD-10 training in an academic surgery department is an effective method to improve documentation rates, increase the hospital estimated reimbursement based on more accurate CD, and provide... read more

The Toll of Death and Disability From Traumatic Injury in the United States

The Toll of Death and Disability From Traumatic Injury in the United States

This viewpoint describes the lack of funding for trauma research as a possible cause of increasing mortality rates from traumatic injury. In a seminal 1966 report, the National Research Council (NRC) declared that unintentional... read more

Ratio-based Transfusion and Non-trauma Patients

Ratio-based Transfusion and Non-trauma Patients

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) urge caution in adopting ratio-based transfusion - a practice previously studied only in patients with severe traumatic injuries - in non-trauma patients. Their study published... read more

Visual Abstracts, A New Strategy for Creating Journal Articles

Visual Abstracts, A New Strategy for Creating Journal Articles

You might be interested in this initiative arising out of surgery, and primarily developed by Andrew M. Ibrahim MD, MSc of the University of Michigan. Dr. Ibrahim is a Clinical Lecturer in Surgery here and a Robert Wood Johnson... read more

Association of Ratio-Based Massive Transfusion With Survival Among Patients Without Trauma

Association of Ratio-Based Massive Transfusion With Survival Among Patients Without Trauma

Association Between Ratio of Fresh Frozen Plasma to Red Blood Cells During Massive Transfusion and Survival Among Patients Without Traumatic Injury. This study reports on the use and benefits of ratio-based blood product... read more