St. Cloud Hospital officials have suspended a nurse suspected of giving 23 patients bacterial infections while stealing their pain medication.
Most of the patients were hospitalized in one unit from last October through early March. Hospital officials aren't sure if more people were infected and are asking any former patients who contracted an infection after they left the hospital to contact them.
The nurse was suspended last week after hospital, state and federal officials noticed a number of similar infections and began looking for a cause.
Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) has launched the nation's first personalized cancer decision-support Web site that will collect and distribute information about the expanding list of genetic mutations that impact different cancers, as well as provide links to research documents on various treatment options based on specific mutations.
The online tool, My Cancer Genome, is linked to Vanderbilt University Medical Center's StarPanel electronic medical record (EMR) database, giving physicians the ability to cross-reference patients' medical histories, lab results, medications, and other medical information with online data that tracks the latest developments in personalized cancer medicine and clinical research.
Researchers continue to use open-source PC drivers for Microsoft's Kinect 3D camera controller to adapt the hardware for new purposes, with one Toronto hospital now using the device to help surgeons manipulate medical images during surgery without the need for time-wasting clean-up.
Surgeons often have to leave the sterile environment around a patient to pull up necessary medical scan images on a computer, a process that can require up to 20 minutes of clean up each time before the surgeon can return to the operation.
A new search tool developed by researchers at Microsoft indexes medical images of the human body, rather than the Web. On CT scans, it automatically finds organs and other structures, to help doctors navigate in and work with 3-D medical imagery.
CT scans use X-rays to capture many slices through the body that can be combined to create a 3-D representation. This is a powerful tool for diagnosis, but it's far from easy to navigate, says Antonio Criminisi, who leads a group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, U.K., that is attempting to change that. "It is very difficult even for someone very trained to get to the place they need to be to examine the source of a problem," he says.
Medicare officials do not plan at this time to change payment terms for anemia drugs used in kidney patients who are undergoing dialysis.
The agency, which is slated to issue a final decision on the matter in June, also said it has found no clear proof that the drugs provide clinical benefits other than increasing hemoglobin.
Endorsement of current reimbursement guidelines would benefit shares of Amgen Inc, which rakes in billions from sales of its flagship Epogen anemia drug for treatment of kidney dialysis patients.
In most medical schools, students recite the Hippocratic Oath together to mark the start of their professional careers. The soon-to-be physicians swear to uphold the ethical standards of the medical profession and promise to stand for their patients without compromise. Though the oath has been rewritten over the centuries, the essence of it has remained the same: "In each house I go, I go only for the good of my patients." But the principles of the oath, says Gregg Bloche, MD, are under an "unprecedented threat." In The Hippocratic Myth, Bloche details how doctors are under constant pressure to compromise or ration their care in order to please lawmakers, lawyers and insurance companies. Bloche says that doctors are increasingly expected to decide which expensive tests and treatments they can and cannot provide for their patients. Their dual role as examiner and cost-cutter can then potentially compromise patients' care, he says, particularly when insurers and hospital administrators urge physicians to only perform "medically necessary" treatment.