Analysis of Quickly Stopped Rx Orders Provides New Tool for Reducing Medical Errors
By studying medication orders that are withdrawn (“discontinued”) by physicians within 45 minutes of their origination, researchers at The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have demonstrated a systematic and efficient method of identifying prescribing errors. The method, they say, has value to screen for medication errors and as a teaching tool for physicians and physicians-in-training. The report is published in the July/August 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Dr. Ross Koppel and colleagues at Penn’s Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology used a hospital’s computerized physician order entry (CPOE) system to track prescriptions that were discontinued within 45 minutes. They found the rate of errors among the quickly stopped orders was 66%. The Rx problem may have been detected by the ordering physician, another physician, a pharmacist, or a nurse, but the prescribing physician issues the stop order.
Averting postsurgical infections in kids: Give antibiotics within hour before first incision
Giving children preventive antibiotics within one hour before they undergo spinal surgery greatly reduces the risk for serious infections after the surgery, suggests a Johns Hopkins study to be published in the August issue of Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal (also available online ahead of print). Children who received antibiotics outside of the golden one-hour window were three and half times more likely to develop serious infections at the surgery site, researchers report, pointing out that something as simple as ensuring that a child gets timely prophylaxis can prevent serious complications and reduce the length of hospital stay.
“When it comes to preventing infections, when a child gets antibiotics appears to be one of the most critical yet most easily modifiable risk factors, and may matter just as much as the type and dosage of the medication ,"says lead researcher Aaron Milstone, M.D., infectious disease specialist at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. “The moral of this is that an ounce of timely prevention is indeed worth a pound of treatment.”
Nearly 780,000 postsurgical infections occur in the United States each year, according to estimates from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. An infection after surgery nearly doubles a patient’s risk of death, doubles a patient’s hospital stay and adds up to $50,000 to treatment costs per patient, researchers say.
Studies refute common stereotypes about obese workers
New research led by a Michigan State University scholar refutes commonly held stereotypes that overweight workers are lazier, more emotionally unstable and harder to get along with than their “normal weight” colleagues.
With the findings, employers are urged to guard against the use of weight-based stereotypes when it comes to hiring, promoting or firing.
Mark Roehling, associate professor of human resource management, and two colleagues studied the relationship between body weight and personality traits for nearly 3,500 adults. Contrary to widely held stereotypes, overweight and obese adults were not found to be significantly less conscientious, less agreeable, less extraverted or less emotionally stable.
Obsessive compulsive disorder linked to brain activity
Cambridge researchers have discovered that measuring activity in a region of the brain could help to identify people at risk of developing obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
As the current diagnosis of OCD is based on a clinical interview and often does not occur until the disorder has progressed, this could enable earlier more objective detection, and intervention.
The scientists, funded by the Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust, have discovered that people with OCD and their close family members show under-activation of brain areas responsible for stopping habitual behaviour. This is the first time that scientists have associated functional changes in the brain with familial risk for the disorder. Their findings are reported in the 18 July edition of Science.
U.S. drops trial of one AIDS vaccine
U.S. AIDS researchers are dropping plans to test one experimental vaccine in people, saying the high-profile failure of a Merck and Co. vaccine last year shows the need to do quicker, more focused studies.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the government’s National Institutes of Health, said on Thursday it was canceling the HIV vaccine study known as PAVE 100.
“However, NIAID believes the vaccine developed by its Vaccine Research Center (VRC) is scientifically intriguing and sufficiently different from previously tested HIV vaccines to consider testing it in a smaller, more focused clinical study,” the institute said in a statement.
“Emotional” writing may help ease cancer pain
Some cancer patients may find that putting their emotions down in writing helps improve their pain and general well-being, a study suggests.
Such writing, part of a concept called “narrative” medicine, has been seen as a way to aid communication between seriously ill patients and their doctors.
But the act of writing, itself, may also help patients better understand themselves and their needs, according to the study team, led by Dr. M. Soledad Cepeda of Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston.
