Hospital Wanderer

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Integrated Hospital Information System Improves Health Care

Many healthcare organizations are presently having difficulties when it comes to the integration and management of financial, operational, and clinical information. This is due to changing reimbursement models, increasing competition, and tightening of margins. The low patient care emphasis also contributes to the problem. Therefore, efficient hospital information system (HIS) is very much needed to control all of these issues.

With regards to this necessity, McKesson's Paragon® provides an information system with a common functionality, which can sustain integrated ancillary products and applications. It is a system that responds to budgetary and HIS requirements.

McKesson is a healthcare information technology company and pharmaceutical distributor. It delivers the information through a single database. A single-vendor approach gets rid of the inefficiencies and complexities that are usually associated with multi-vendor solutions.

The Paragon HIS has also a complete integrated system for care management, clinical workflow, practice management, pharmacy automation, and medical supply management. All of these address the needs for a certified Electronic Health Record (EHR), safety of the patients, revenue cycle management, and a lot more.

This company provides information technology to hospitals starting with the large, multi-entity organizations up to community and critical hospitals. This is designed for the dynamic needs of healthcare organizations that include medical professionals in uniform scrubs.

McKesson invests $1 billion in R&D technology as part of its future initiatives, entitled Better Health 2020. This is for the purpose of utilizing information technology in health care strategically. Furthermore, this would be of great help for healthcare providers to achieve better business, healthcare service, and connectivity. Also, it is a way of delivering better medical care to patients.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Multivitamins Can't Prolong Life

"...there are no benefits to taking multivitamins or supplements, at least if the hope is to prolong life or prevent disease or cancer." (Jaakko Mursu, nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota)

In recent years, studies have shown that vitamins such as A, C and E, which were supposed to lower risk of chronic illnesses like heart disease and cancer, didn't provide much benefit. But many patients kept taking them anyway, and few doctors in medical scrubs actively discouraged it, since the studies didn't show that taking vitamins did much harm either. Now, Jaakko Mursu, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, reports with his colleagues in the Archives of Internal Medicine that women who took multivitamins were 6% more likely to die over a 19-year period, compared with women not taking them.

Mursu and his team wearing lab coats or medical scrubs found that using multivitamins, which nearly half of all American adults do, was linked to a higher risk of death among a group of 38,000 women, average age 62, who were studied for nearly two decades. "Most supplements contain high amounts of specific compounds, and high doses could be toxic," says Mursu. "If you combine several supplements, or a multivitamin with supplements, then you reach even higher potentially toxic doses."

The researchers also looked at a variety of other supplements and found higher odds of death associated with six of them: Vitamin B 10% higher risk of death, compared with nonusers, Folic acid: 15%, Iron: 10%, Magnesium: 8%, Zinc: 8% and Copper: 45%

Thus, Mursu finally advise women to reconsider whether they need to use supplements, and if they really not in need of it, improving their diet is a better choice for it is more practical and safer.

Source: Google Image | Vitamins and Supplements Linked to Higher Risk of Death

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Disease Contamination at Hospitals are Possibly Caused by Scrubs Cheap and Nursing Uniforms

Ever heard of MRSA or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus?

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a type or strain of staph bacteria that does not respond to some antibiotics commonly used to treat staph infections. This dangerous antibiotic-resistant infection has plagued hospitals for years. Sadly, nurses and doctors are the ideal agents of these superbugs as they go along their hospital duties. The harmful pathogens, including MRSA, collect in their nursing uniforms or scrubs cheap and they may pass the danger to other patients, to their families or even their colleagues.

Previous research and studies have found that nurses’ scrubs uniforms are often contaminated. In 1969, Staphylococcus aureus was found by British researches on nurses uniforms. Some British researchers on 1983 also reported contamination of cotton gowns and in 2001 another team reported finding Staphylococcus aureus, Clostridium difficile and vancomycin-resistant enterococci on nursing uniforms. Now, a recent study by Israeli scientists, led by Yonit Wiener-Well, M.D., from the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, showed that medical scrubs cheap and nursing uniforms are contaminated by harmful pathogens including MRSA or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The study which was published in the September issue of the American Journal of Infection Control reported that 65 % of the hospital nurses uniforms and 60% of the doctors’ uniforms tested positive for potentially dangerous bacteria.

So, what do you think? Are nursing uniforms and scrubs cheap the culprit for the contamination of disease from the hospitals to our community? And if this is true, what should hospitals do in order to prevent the said contamination?

Sources: Nursing Uniforms Are Possible Sources of Potentially Dangerous Bacteria | Nurses Uniforms: Agents of Disease Contamination | Google image

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Airport Hospitals: A New Trend

Typically, we could found hospitals at a specific place and site in our community. However, nowadays, hospitals have a drastic change that we could find medical office and people in lab coats and sphygmomanometer at the airports wherein there are indeed incidental patients and people that needed medical help.

Like a typical doctor’s office, most airport medical facilities have a waiting area and exam room with x-ray services and vaccinations available. They’re staffed by a physician in lab coats, physician’s assistant or nurse practitioner with sphygmomanometer. While most of these centers don’t offer prescription meds on site, the medical personnel can write you a prescription and some are even open 24 hours.

Here are some of the airports with medical offices and hospitals for the safety of their passengers.

New York’s JFK airport
New Jersey’s Newark international airports
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL)
Memphis International Airport (MEM)
Boston Logan International Airport (BOS)
Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport (MKE)
Baltimore Washington International Airport (BWI)
Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR)
Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD)
Philadelphia International Airport (PHL)
Honolulu International Airport (HNL)
Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX)
Houston Hobby Airport (HOU)
Portland International Airport (PDX)
Indianapolis International Airport (IND)
Portland International Jetport (PWM)
Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)
Romulus/Detroit Metro Airport (DTW)
Louisville International Airport (SDF)
San Antonio International Airport (SAT)
Manchester Boston Regional Airport (MHT)
Washington Dulles International Airport (IAD)

Source: A Hospital at the Airport?

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

The July Effect on Hospitals: Truth or Myth?

"Avoid hospitals in July like the plague."

If you can, stay out of the hospital during the summer especially July. That's the month when medical students become interns, interns become residents, and residents become fellows and full-fledged doctors. In other words, some of the staff at any given teaching hospital is new on the job.

Summer hospital horror stories aren't just medical lore: The adjusted mortality rate rises 4% in July and August for the average major teaching hospital, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. That means 8 to 14 more deaths occur at major teaching hospitals than would normally without the turnover.

Another scheduling tip: Try to book surgeries first thing in the morning and preferably early in the week when doctors are at their best and before schedules get backed up.

July is the 7th month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian Calendars and one of seven months with the length of 31 days. It is, on average, the warmest month in most of the Northern hemisphere and the coldest month in much of the Southern hemisphere. July's birthstone is the ruby which symbolizes contentment. Yet, hospitals and men and women in lab coats, I guess will never be contented on the month of July since in this month the most experienced medical residents graduate leave hospitals, just as newly minted M.D.s arrive to start caring for their first patients. This trend on July month was confirmed by a new research taking the first comprehensive look at death rates and complications occurring in hospitals throughout the year.

According to the team lead by Dr. John Young of the University of California, San Francisco, at teaching hospitals responsible for training new doctors, patient death rates increase while efficiency in patient care decreases during the month of July. In these hospitals, admitted patients serve as case studies used to educate future physicians on the best way to provide care; medical residents spend anywhere from three to six years as doctors-in-training, shadowing more experienced physicians as they learn how to diagnose and treat patients.

Furthermore, according to Time.com:

In the month of July the most experienced residents graduate, leaving behind those who haven't logged as many hours in the clinic or in patient wards. The older residents' departure also coincides with the entry of a new class of freshman residents — new doctors who are taking on the responsibility of patient care for the first time.

Not surprisingly, the changeover can disrupt patient care in hospitals, increasing complications from surgery and boosting medical error rates, particularly as new doctors who are unfamiliar with a hospital's pharmacy system mistakenly prescribe wrong doses of medications. The shift also decreases efficiency, with more unneeded or duplicate tests being ordered and patients being kept in the hospital longer than necessary.

However another article denied this July effect but instead wrote that;

"Key to the understanding that paper, however, is grasping that its conclusions apply solely to teaching hospitals, institutions where residents and interns treat patients as part of their medical training. It's therefore not true that all hospitals become a bit more dangerous in July. It's also not true that all teaching hospitals experience this decline.

Well, as for me, I guess death rate and bad patient care of medical professionals and practitioners wearing lab coats and nursing uniforms doesn't depend on a particular month but on the quality of service they give to their patients. No matter what month, or when and where, doctors and nurses in nursing uniforms must be careful in whatever they are doing with their patients.

Friday, June 10, 2011

The Threat From European E. Coli

The deadly outbreak of European E. coli has produced great distressed on people all over the world as well as to those medical personnel in lab coats and nursing scrubs. Even the World Health Organization (WHO) said that this European E- coli is a unique strain that has never been isolated from patients before. The new strain has “various characteristics that make it more virulent and toxin-producing” than the many E. coli strains people naturally carry in their intestines. Let me give you an excerpt of the news that I got from healtzone.ca.

Researchers have so far been unable to pinpoint the cause of the illness, which has now spread to at least 10 European countries and fanned uncertainty about eating tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce. The strain has sickened more than 1,500 people, including 470 who have developed a rare kidney failure complication, and killed 18 — most of them in Germany, the country hardest hit.

However, scientists and other people that are usually wearing nursing scrubs and lab coats made a way to know more about this E. coli strain.

Scientists sequencing the bacteria strains found in the outbreak said it was caused by “an entirely new super-toxic E. Coli strain” that several antibiotic resistant genes, according to a statement from the Shenzhen, China-based laboratory, BGI. The researchers were working together with scientists from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.

Hilde Kruse, a food safety expert at WHO said it’s not uncommon for bacteria to continually mutate, evolving and swapping genes. It is difficult to explain where the new strain came from, she said, but said strains of bacteria from both humans and animals easily trade genes, similar to how animal viruses like Ebola sometimes jump into humans.

Previous E. Coli outbreaks have mainly hit children and the elderly, but the European outbreak is disproportionately affecting adults, especially women. Kruse said there might be something particular about the bacteria strain that makes it more dangerous for adults.

The outbreak is already considered the third-largest involving E. coli in recent world history, and it may be the deadliest. Twelve people died in a 1996 Japanese outbreak that reportedly sickened more than 9,000, and seven died in a 2000 Canadian outbreak.

The effect...

Fearful of the outbreak spreading east to Russia, the country extended a ban on vegetables to the entire European Union from just Germany and Spain, a move the bloc quickly called disproportionate.

Recommendation...

The WHO recommends that to avoid food-borne illnesses people wash their hands before eating or cooking food, separating raw and cooked meat from other foods, thoroughly cooking food, and washing fruits and vegetables, especially if eaten raw. Experts also recommend peeling raw fruits and vegetables if possible.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

A Glimpse of Best Children's Hospital in US

Here is the list of the America’s Best Children’s Hospital in accordance with U.S. News & World Report. The criteria was not based on how many doctors they have in the hospital, nor children patients, nor how hi-tech are their medical instruments, medical equipments and tuning fork but Best Children's Hospitals focuses on medical centers whose young patients come with cancer, cystic fibrosis, defective hearts, and other life-threatening, rare, or demanding conditions. The rankings showcase the top 50 children's centers—20 more than last year—in each of 10 specialties: cancer, cardiology and heart surgery, diabetes and endocrinology, gastroenterology, neonatology, nephrology, neurology and neurosurgery, orthopedics, pulmonology, and urology.

Children's Hospital Boston

The hospital with a 396-licensed bed children's hospital in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area of Boston, Massachusetts. Children's was the first stand-alone pediatric hospital in New England to be awarded Magnet status by the American Nurses Credentialing Center. One of the largest pediatric medical centers in the United States,Children's offers a complete range of health care services for children from birth through 21 years of age. Its Advanced Fetal Care Center can begin interventions at 15 weeks gestation, and in some situations (e.g., congenital heart disease and strabismus) Children's treats adults. Children's Hospital scientist Dr. John Enders and his team were first to successfully culture the polio virus and were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954.Dr. Joseph Murray, chief plastic surgeon at Children's Hospital Boston from 1972-1985 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990 for his research on immunosuppression.

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) is one of the largest and oldest children's hospitals in the world. CHOP has been ranked as the best children's hospital in the United States by U.S. News & World Report and Parents Magazine in recent years. As of 2008, it was ranked #1 in the nation for paediatrics. Each year the hospital admits more than 15,000 children and more than 600,000 are seen in the emergency and outpatient departments.

Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center

Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) is a 523-bed pediatric hospital located in Cincinnati, Ohio. It is home to the country's busiest pediatric emergency department, performs the second largest number of surgical procedures at a children's hospital in the nation, and is southwest Ohio's only Level 1 pediatric trauma center. Cincinnati Children's receives the second-most NIH funds of any pediatric institution in the United States. The pediatric residency training program at CCHMC is among the largest in the world, training approximately 130 graduate physicians each year. Cincinnati Children's is home to a large neonatology department that oversees newborn nurseries at local hospitals and the medical center's own 59-bed Level III Regional Center for Newborn Intensive Care.American Hospital Association-McKesson Quest for Quality Prize for its leadership in improving outcomes through family-centered care and a dedication to transparency (2006).

Texas Children's Hospital, Houston

Texas Children's Hospital is a pediatric hospital located in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas. With 639 licensed beds and 465 beds in operation, Texas Children's is the largest children's hospital in the United States and is affiliated with the Baylor College of Medicine as that institution's primary pediatric training site. Texas Children's has garnered widespread recognition for its expertise and breakthrough developments in the treatment of pediatric cancer, diabetes, asthma, HIV, premature birth, attention-related disorders, organ transplants and cardiogenic disorders. More than 42 pediatric subspecialties are available to patients at Texas Children's. The hospital's medical staff includes more than 1,580 board-certified, primary-care physicians, pediatric subspecialists, pediatric surgeons and dentists. In 2003, Texas Children's more than 1,000 nurses achieved national Magnet Recognition, one of the highest honors in nursing.

Children's Hospital Colorado, Denver

The Children’s Hospital is a nationally-ranked, nonprofit hospital for children located in Colorado. For more than a decade, U.S. News & World Report has recognized The Children's Hospital as one of the nation's top 10 children’s hospitals. The Children’s Hospital ranked seventh (7th) in the magazine's “America’s Best Children’s Hospitals” issue published in May 2008. The Children’s Hospital was awarded Magnet nursing status in 2005. The Magnet Nursing Services Recognition Program was established in 1993 to recognize healthcare organizations that provide the very best in nursing care. Out of 100 children’s hospitals in the nation, The Children’s Hospital ranked 10th for overall care; 2nd in pulmonary care; 7th in ER care; and 9th in orthopedic care.

Johns Hopkins Children's Center, Baltimore

Opened in 1912 as The Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children, the nation’s first pediatric hospital affiliated with an academic research institution, Johns Hopkins. Baltimore banker Henry Johnston and his wife Harriet Lane bequeathed our founding funds in memory of their sons, who died in childhood from rheumatic fever. By 1930, their clinicians had discovered that sulfa drugs can prevent its fatal cardiac devastation. According from them, "for nearly a century now, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of American pediatric medicine and developing world-class care for the sickest children and their families. Visit here often for more about our revolutionary brand of medicine and the dedication, innovation and brilliance..."