A new study has found a correlation between how hospitals are rated on Facebook's five-star system and how well they performed on a widely-used measure of quality care. Late in 2013, Facebook began providing organizations the option of allowing users to post ratings ranging from one to five stars on their official Facebook pages. The current study was designed to compare hospitals' 30-day readmission rates with their Facebook ratings. "We found that the hospitals in which patients were less likely to have unplanned readmissions within the 30 days after discharge had higher Facebook ratings than were those with higher readmission rates," says lead author McKinley Glover, M.D., MHS, a clinical fellow in the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Department of Radiology.
U.S. health regulators on Thursday announced strict new recommendations for preventing the transmission of infections from reusable medical devices such at those that have spread "superbug" infections at several hospitals. A key change is that when manufacturers submit instructions for disinfecting the devices between uses, the Food and Drug Administration will not take the company's word that the instructions work, but will demand proof. The FDA action followed reports last month that hundreds of patients may have been exposed to pathogens, including antibiotic-resistant "superbugs," after flexible tubes called duodenoscopes were not properly disinfected between patients. Two patients at the University of California-Los Angeles died.
An internal review uncovered "an apparent culture of fear" and unusual medication practices at a VA hospital nicknamed "Candyland" by some because of a surge in pain-killer prescriptions. The Department of Veterans Affairs looked into allegations that psychiatric patients at its medical center in Tomah, Wisconsin, had been overprescribed powerful narcotic medications and concluded there were grounds for a more in-depth investigation, according to a VA memo released this week. The findings come almost two months after the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that the number of opiates doled out at the Tomah hospital nearly quadrupled in eight years — and two weeks after NBC News
The visit started out ordinary enough: a new patient, a healthy man in his late 30s who hadn't seen a doctor in years. When we got to preventive health, I recommended the flu shot. He politely declined. "I don't do vaccines," he said. I glanced at the clock, debating whether or not I should wade into those waters. Given that we are knee-deep in flu season, the flu-shot conversation comes up at every single visit every single day, and it can be exhausting. For those who decline vaccines on principle, I've learned from experience that they are unlikely to change their minds no matter what I say.
The chance of surviving any of four high-risk surgeries can vary by as much as 23 percent depending on what hospital patients use, according to an analysis released on Thursday. The report - by the nonprofit Leapfrog Group, a patient-safety organization supported by large employers, and Castlight Health Inc, which sells software for employers to manage healthcare spending - shows that choice of hospital "can mean the difference between life and death," said Leapfrog's Erica Mobley. Rating hospitals has become somewhat of a free-for-all, with competing groups using different data and definitions of quality.
On the evening of April 19, 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was rushed by ambulance to Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center after a gun battle with the FBI. Dr. Stephen Odom was the attending trauma surgeon on call. Boston and its surrounding towns had been on lockdown all day as police hunted Tsarnaev, and it was a tense time throughout the city — not least of all at the hospital, where several marathon bombing victims were recuperating from surgeries and amputations. Tsarnaev arrived with multiple gunshot wounds, "the most severe of which appears to have entered through the left side inside of his mouth and exited the left…lower face," Odom told a judge in a hospital bedside court hearing on April 22.