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Why doctors prescribe more opioids at the end of the day
Sheilamary Koch PharmaceuticalMore opioid prescriptions were written for patients seeing their primary care provider toward the end of the day, according to a study published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Time pressure influencing doctors’ clinical decision-making is a long-standing concept, yet little empirical research has examined its validity or magnitude, write the researchers of the study Hannah Neprash, Ph.D., and Michael Barnette, MD. Specifically, they examined how appointment timing affects prescribing for patients with pain.
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Are you a 2- or 3-dimensional healthcare job candidate?
Keith Carlson Medical & Allied HealthcareWhen you have a stake as a job candidate in the healthcare employment marketplace, being able to differentiate yourself from the competition is key. Your future employer is going to spend a great deal of money and resources vetting, hiring, training, and onboarding you, so you need to clearly communicate that you’re worthy of this expensive and time-consuming process that constitutes a financial risk for any organization that chooses to hire you.
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How a lean management approach can improve patient outcomes
Lisa Mulcahy Healthcare AdministrationLean management: it's an interesting concept in the business world and sounds like a great way to streamline your approach as a hospital administrator. So, what is it, exactly? Lean management's core principles are that you deliver value from your customer’s perspective; you eliminate waste; and you continue to improve in every way possible as your work progresses. This sounds like a tall order — but if you do an overview of the way certain hospital procedures are currently handled, you'll see where you should focus your efforts to go lean, and things will fall into place.
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Living life on the edge: Compassionately caring for all patients
Lisa Cole Medical & Allied HealthcareI'm not referring to folks who are bungee jumping, cliff diving, zip lining or driving race cars here. Rather, the opposite. While we providers do patch up plenty of such patients in the aftermath of such death-defying (or not!) feats, more often we care for those whose entire lives entail living on the edge. Think mental illness, chronic pain, the imprisoned, the disabled, victims of abuse, the homeless, dying patients and the poor. Let's examine our perceptions of patients, coping, resiliency and how we care.
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Researchers find controversial results after investigating opioid use,…
Lynn Hetzler Medical & Allied HealthcareIt is almost universally agreed that opioid prescription in the emergency department (ED) is risky, largely because of the risk of abuse. The results of a recent study suggest the risk of long-term prescription opioid use and potential misuse stemming from ED prescriptions for opioids to treat acute pain is less than some might expect. Lead author of the study, Raoul Daoust, MD, MSc, and his team wanted to assess opioid use rate and the reasons patients continue to consume opioids three months after discharge from the emergency department with an opioid prescription. They found that opioid use was relatively low three months after discharge from the ED with an opioid prescription.
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5 ways to incorporate pharmacists onto your inpatient care teams
Lisa Mulcahy Healthcare AdministrationAs a healthcare professional, you know the important role your organization's pharmacists play in every patient's treatment and recovery. But did you know that your pharmacists can have a much greater impact on improving outcomes beyond their traditional consult role with your physicians? Cutting-edge research has illuminated fresh ways that your pharmacists' knowledge can be used as active members of inpatient teams. Try this proven advice.
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CMS: Hospitals must post rates; hospitals not interested in doing so
Scott E. Rupp Medical & Allied HealthcareIn healthcare, it seems that nothing is easy — technology, regulation, privacy, and security. And now, pricing. Efforts are underway to make prices more transparent; this is a tentpole issue for the Trump administration, which wants hospitals to begin posting "shoppable" prices online in 2020. According to reports, some hospitals are facing some challenges for doing so and are trying to figure out how they'll be able to meet the requirement.
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Hyperbaric safety drills: Are you prepared?
Tiffany Hamm and Jeff Mize Healthcare AdministrationKnowing emergency procedures and drills are critical to safety in the workplace and for your patients. Performing drills can help in the following ways: 1. You can ensure that alarms/equipment are working properly. 2. Everybody knows their roles and responsibilities and becomes confident with how to respond to an emergency. 3. You can validate that your emergency procedures are effective or identify areas that need improvement. There are many emergency scenarios that hyperbaric staff should be prepared to respond to.
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15 studies retracted amid fears of organs’ origin
Chelsea Adams Medical & Allied HealthcareMore than a dozen scientific research papers have been retracted amid suspicions the organs used in the studies came from executed Chinese prisoners. During August, the journals PLOS ONE and Transplantation retracted 15 studies by Chinese authors after questions regarding the source of donated organs were posed. The studies were originally published between 2008 and 2014 and dealt with kidney and liver transplants. Two additional journals have also expressed concern regarding published studies.
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Researchers chase new treatments for urinary tract infections
Dorothy L. Tengler Medical & Allied HealthcareIn the United States, urinary tract infections (UTIs) account for more than 8-10 million office visits and 100,000 hospitalizations each year. Women are significantly more likely to experience a UTI than men. According to Professor Mark Schembri from the University of Queensland's School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, the problem of UTIs is magnified by increasing antimicrobial resistance, and antibiotic treatments can sometimes just stop working on some patients, with dire results. A recent study, performed in collaboration with researchers from the University of Utah, followed a long-term recurrent UTI sufferer, using genetic analysis to find out whether the infection came from a single bacterial "reservoir" in the body.
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