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In patients with acute cardiogenic pulmonary edema, CPAP or NIV produces a more rapid improvement in respiratory distress and arterial blood gases than standard therapy.
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Uncomplicated type B aortic dissection (origin distal to left subclavian artery) is usually treated medically. However, early mortality is 10%-12%, and is due to complications.
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Intravenous thrombolysis is safe and effective for the treatment of ischemic stroke in the time window of 3-4.5 hours after the onset of symptoms.
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The incidence of legionellosis in the United States increased significantly in 2003-2005 compared to previous years. This was due mostly to an upsurge of cases in the northeastern and southern United States and a shift of disease from elderly to middle-aged adults. Legionellosis should be considered as a potential cause of pneumonia in a broad range of patients, rather than a small subset with specific risk factors.
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Many physicians have followed the historical practice of ordering blood cultures to be drawn as close as possible to the time of the peak of the febrile episode (fever spike). In the absence of prescient knowledge of this moment, physicians order blood cultures to be drawn at intervals ranging from 30 minutes to 2 hours. A paper by Jaimes et al suggested that many factors, other than fever, such as shaking chills, WBC counts, hypotension, and more were needed to better predict whether a patient was experiencing bacteremia.
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The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that a final rule will appear in the Nov. 18, 2008, Federal Register detailing changes to the agency's outpatient ambulatory surgical center (ASC) payment system.
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An unlucky 13 out of every 1,000 inpatients in recently surveyed hospitals were either infected or colonized with Clostridium difficile, a rate that is 6.5 to 20 times higher than previous incidence estimates.
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(Editor's note: The following frequently asked questions were posted on The Joint Commission web site regarding the issue of health care-associated infections and sentinel events. They were marked as most recently reviewed in March 2008.)
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Conducting an inspection in a Las Vegas endoscopy clinic shortly before it became the epicenter of the largest "look-back" patient testing effort in medical history, inspectors for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services saw nothing amiss with needle practices that ultimately led to a nationally publicized hepatitis C outbreak, Hospital Infection Control & Prevention has learned.
