Dr. Jodi Sherman wants to expand the medical profession’s understanding of patient safety far beyond the exam room and hospital bed. For Sherman, the oft-heard medical mantra of “first do no harm” should also push the health care system to do more to reduce its harmful air emissions and their impact on people’s health.
Hospitals have improved heart-attack care and reduced central-line infections by adopting relatively simple evidence-based procedures.
At least 50 cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome have been diagnosed in South Korea, where a 68-year-old man who recently traveled to the Middle East visited four hopsitals before being diagnosed.
Saving Boston victims’ lives and limbs required a well-coordinated response from emergency medical teams, the city’s emergency command center, and hospital staff. Such coordination requires ongoing planning, and planning requires funding.
CDC Director Tom Frieden held a press briefing to warn about carapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), which are increasing at an alarming rate.
One thing that drove me nuts during the healthcare reform debate was the scare tactic of claiming that proposed legislation would result in rationing of healthcare. The problem with making such a claim is that healthcare is already rationed in the US. We ration healthcare based on insurance status and ability to pay. And, as […]
Last year, Atul Gawande wrote an interesting New Yorker piece that compares present-day efforts to control healthcare costs with early 20th-century efforts to increase US farming productivity. The quest for more farming productivity succeeded not because of any grand, sweeping reform, he explains, but because the government, through the USDA, invested in pilot programs, scientific […]
A New York Times article by Jane Gross highlights a costly healthcare problem: avoidable hospital readmissions, which affect one in five patients and account for $17.4 billion of the current $102.6 billion Medicare budget. (When people talk about readmissions, they’re generally referring to an admission within 30 days of the previous admission for the same […]