All
RSSArticles
-
Work With Community Partners to Develop Solutions for Opioid Use Disorder Patients
While many emergency physicians are reluctant to tackle the issue of addiction, there is growing recognition that EDs offer a huge opportunity to identify patients with opioid use disorders and link them to meaningful care. The obstacles are many, but forward-thinking emergency medicine leaders in regions hit hard by the opioid epidemic are finding paths to success, often in partnership with other agencies or community groups.
-
Evaluation and Management of Ectopic Pregnancy in the Emergency Department
Ectopic pregnancy has significant health consequences and represents an important cause of morbidity and mortality for women of reproductive age. Making the diagnosis of ectopic pregnancy expeditiously is critical to reduce morbidity and mortality associated with the condition.
-
Reader Survey Available
We'd love to hear from you how we can do better!
-
Cutting Corners in the ASC
What do you do when witnessing someone cutting corners? Speak up. The compromise in quality or safety often begins at the top. Once that top-down culture permeates a facility, it is only a matter of time before the entire program is infected and something disastrous happens.
-
Medicare Surveyors Catch Same Mistakes, Now Issue Harsher Penalties
The types of citations have stayed the same, but the repercussions are more severe. CMS survey trends show the same pattern of mistakes caught by federal surveyors. In response, a new trend has emerged: harsher citations.
-
Study Raises Questions About Reimbursement Metrics for DRG-Based Bundled Payments
Researchers examined reimbursement in bundled payment programs in spine surgery and found that providers are reimbursed the same amount for lumbar fusions regardless of several factors that could affect use and costs.
-
Streamlined Surgical Trays Can Lead to Time, Money Savings
A surgery center found that efforts to streamline endocrine surgical trays led to faster tray preparation time and saved $31.62 per operation in reprocessing costs. By streamlining trays for a more exact fit with each procedure, the hospital projected a $28,000 annual savings in instrument reprocessing.
-
Possible Flaws When Reprocessing Single-Use Items
The FDA allows surgery centers to reprocess some single-use items, following a standardized process. But there are some changing market pressures that shed doubt on whether this efficiency is feasible. There also have been problems when surgery centers perform procedures incorrectly.
-
Investigators Find Connections Between Surgical Tool Design, Reuse, and Contamination
After surgical instruments undergo multiple uses and processing cycles, they can become contaminated while sustaining structural damage and collecting biofilm. Researchers found that after using and decontaminating surgical instruments 20 times, neither a manual nor automated cleaning process removed all the patient secretions.
-
Reprocessing and Cleaning Breaches Haunt Some ORs
Patients have sued a Colorado hospital over infections that occurred after surgery. The lawsuit follows public notification of an earlier infection breach in surgical instrument sterilization and cleaning.