July 2010
23 posts
MSH Gel Cures Cavities →
To test their theory, the French scientists applied either a film or gel, both of which contained MSH, to cavity-filled mice teeth. After about one month, the cavities had disappeared, said Benkirane-Jessel.
[Via Discovery Health]
June 2010
26 posts
Nashville will launch bicycle sharing program →
Two locations: downtown and Shelby Bottoms. Just flash your license to the attendant and go. Sounds great.
Atul Gawande's Commencement Speech, Stanford... →
An inspiring speech, and accessible to non-medical folks, too.
[Thanks, Winston H.]
How EMR and EHR systems can kill patients →
Between 2006 and 2010, six patient deaths have been attributed to EHR-related problems. Margalit Gur-Arie gives the breakdown:
Out of the 6 reported deaths (2 of which occurred in 2006), one was related to a PACS system latency, another to human error in labeling an x-ray cassette and another to a hospital pharmacy system. 2 deaths were attributed to system wide failures of CPOE and one to lack...
Tennessee is second fattest state in the nation →
31.6 percent of Tennessee’s adults are obese.
The Real Cost of Being House's Patient →
Brad Wright of Wright on Health on Andrew Holtz, author of The Medical Science of House, M.D.:
Holtz concludes that the course of diagnostic testing that a patient undergoes in one particular episode of the show would cost in the ballpark of $298,000 give or take a few thousand. That’s more than the average cost of raising a child from birth to age 18… .
The interview with Holz is...
EMR Implementation: e-Learning Should Be Part of... →
Jonena Relth, writing for Healthcare Talent Transformation, argues that EMR adoption is hampered most by insufficient training:
Well, my experience has been with EMR implementation is that leaders don’t understand that the most important component of an EMR implementation is related to change management – the people side of integrating new processes and technology.
Yeah, that and the fact...
"Health IT is the Future of Medicine" →
Peggy Salvatore:
Remember the survival techniques: measure it, record it, analyze it and report on the results, then measure it again. At some point, we’ll know enough about diseases and treatments that the actions we take will be the best ones, given the evidence accrued over time, and we’ll save a lot of lives, and some of our very limited dollars, too.
[Via Healthcare Talent Transformation]
Health Wonk Review on Single-Payer, Etc. →
A chunky summary of our current state-of-affairs vis-a-vis healthcare reform from D. Brad Wright at Health Wonk Review, particularly this bit here:
Over at Managed Care Matters, Joe Paduda covers this topic by looking at a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office that finds that the VA health system has done a wonderful job of controlling costs while providing exceptionally high quality...
1 tag
NIHN Direct: Finally! Emailable EHRs
In this article by David C. Kibbe, you can learn about NIHN Direct, a new service for small clinics or large hospitals that allows them to send and receive digital health records to and from other providers.
This is extremely important. Folks don’t realize that, despite the fact that this is 2010, most clinics and many large hospitals still use fax machines to exchange data. There are several...
iPad in the Operating Room →
Video of Japanese surgeons using an iPad during surgery to pinch and zoom their way around preoperative CT scans.
[Via Mashable, of course.]
Pilot Handwriting →
Pilot Handwriting allows you to easily create a usable font based on your own handwriting. Complete a set of glyphs and upload a photo of them. Pilot does the rest automatically. Send emails seemingly in your own cursive, without picking up a pen. Simply amazing.
TV Comedian Elected Mayor of Reykjavik →
With his party having won 6 of the City Council’s 15 seats, Mr. Gnarr needed a coalition partner, but ruled out any party whose members had not seen all five seasons of “The Wire.”
[Via the New York Times]
Dissecting Physician Resistance to CPOE →
Timothy Hartzog on Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE):
Hard stops in CPOE are just a bad idea and lead to angry physicians.
Agreed, with the addendum that hard stops lead to angry nurses, too.
Dead Student's Mother Sues School Nurse →
His mother contends that the school’s Automated External Defibrillator (AED) was locked in the school’s office at the time Tanner collapsed. His mother believes that the AED would have saved his life.
[Via the Tennessean]
Driver’s license office sued over immigrant’s... →
Hispanic-American citizens, with valid documents proving their citizenship, are being abused by DMV clerks. The clerks are confiscating and damaging their documents in an attempt to invalidate them. Need I mention that this is happening here in Tennessee?
[Via the Tennessean]
George Orwell: Politics and the English Language →
This essay should be required reading for all incoming grad students and other would-be academic types.
If Fourty-Four Percent of Hospitals Have CPOE . .... →
… then guess what percentage of physicians are actually using it? The depressing yet unsurprising answer is on page ten, in table five. Your garden-variety electronic medical records now have empirically-verifiable suckiness.
[Via HIMMS Analytics]
ACGME Proposed Guidlines for Resident Training →
Pauline Chen, MD quoting a beloved instructor on the newly-proposed ACGME guidelines:
“But everyone is going to end up focusing on the hours when they start making these changes,” Dr. M finally concluded. “They’ll do that because it’s the easiest thing to do.” He smiled sadly, then added, “The supervision — the most important part — is going to go by the wayside because it’s so much more...
Researchers Discover How Folate Promotes Healing... →
“Interestingly, the more folate we gave, the more regrowth we saw, eventually achieving almost a tenfold increase in axonal regeneration,” Dr. Iskandar said. Beyond the peak dose of 80 micrograms per kilogram of body weight, the effect decreased but without causing toxicity or nerve damage.
Via the NIH.
Hallucinations in Hospital Pose Risk to Elderly →
“We got her death certificate, and the No. 1 cause of death was delirium,” said Ms. Byrd, an ophthalmology nurse. “I was just blown away. As a nurse, I was expecting a quote-unquote medical reason: kidneys, heart, lung, an organ that I could understand had failed, and it wasn’t. It was delirium.”
Via the NY Times.
Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo →
From the NEJM:
Treatment of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo is directed at returning the displaced otoconia to their proper location in the inner ear. Various effective particle-repositioning maneuvers have been developed and are curative in most cases.
You’re not far off the mark if you imagine “particle repositioning maneuvers” working in a manner similar to a ball-bearing maze game. Those...
1 tag
The iPhone 4's Retina Display
During Steve Jobs’ keynote address at WWDC, he made the claim that, when held at a distance of ten inches, the human retina can’t distinguish individual pixels at a resolution of 300ppi or higher. The new iPhone 4 boasts a resolution of 326ppi, what Jobs described as “comfortably over” the 300ppi limit.
Seeing the new display in person last night, I was unable to distinguish pixels at any...
A Craving for Ice Is a Sign of Anemia →
Anahad O’Connor sums up the literature:
“The patient’s husband frequently observed her in the middle of the night with her head in the freezer eating the frost off the icemaker,” the report stated. “This craving resolved after transfusion and iron administration.”
Via the New York Times.
BP Chief Draws Outrage for Watching Yacht Race →
Real classy, Mr. Hayward.
Why MDs Dread EMRs →
Shahid Shah:
It’s not about the money – billions of government money being thrown at physicians won’t solve bad design. Physicians aren’t averse to technology; they are averse to technology that misuse [sic] their time and reduces patient interaction.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
NICU Emergency Evacuation Drill →
Simulated emergency evacuation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. I was wondering just the other day how best to accomplish something like this.