Readmission rates to hospitals are often used as markers for quality of care, although a consistent link between readmissions and quality has not been established. Leora I Horwitz and colleagues conducted a retrospective cross-sectional study from 4651 US acute care hospitals. They found that standardised readmission rates are lowest in the lowest volume hospitals. This is highly […]
Rahul K Parikh: Violence against doctors in the US
Late last month, Stephen Pasceri walked into a Boston hospital and asked someone to point him in the direction of his deceased mother’s surgeon, Dr Michael Davidson. When he found Dr Davidson, Pasceri drew his gun and shot him. Davidson, age 44, a husband and father of three kids, would later die from his wounds. […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . First things first
Which words came first? And whence comes “first?” In his Historiai, Book II, Herodotus tells how an Egyptian king, Psamtik (he calls him Psammetichus), undertook an experiment. He entrusted two children to a herdsman, charging him to allow no one to utter a word in their presence, to keep them in a cottage and to […]
Julian Sheather: Will the confluence of big data and the genomics revolution lead to a transformation in personalized healthcare?
Will the confluence of big data and the genomics revolution lead to a transformation in personalized healthcare, or are the emperors’ clothes looking a little threadbare? This was the theme of the Astellas Innovation Debate for 2015, held in the Royal Institution’s lovely raking lecture theatre in Albermarle Street. George Freeman, Minister for Life Sciences, […]
The BMJ Today: Start your week by fine tuning your clinical research skills
Most doctors are dedicated clinicians who have worked extremely hard to earn the privilege of practising the art of medicine and caring for their fellow human beings. But there are, unfortunately, always some doctors who don’t live up to the oath they took when they finished medical school. Yet I always feel a mix of […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—9 February 2015
NEJM 5 Feb 2015 Vol 372 519 Refractory angina seems to be common in cardiac clinics but not in primary care. When all the drugs have failed, and revascularization is not an option, device makers like to get inventive. The latest gizmo is an hour-glass shaped expandable metal object which sits at the portal of […]
Khaled El Emam: Is it safe to anonymize data?
Recently an article was published in Science claiming that it is easy to re-identify credit card transaction data that has been anonymized. While this is not health data, the authors generalize their conclusions to all other human behavior data. Credit card transactions can, however, leak health information if the store is a pharmacy, for example. […]
Penny Pereira: What does it really take to improve patient safety?
How confident are you that the risk management processes in your organisation enable you to predict and manage all the risks your patients are likely to face? If you have doubts, you’re probably not alone, as the findings from our Safer Clinical Systems programme suggest. Looking back at my time on the board of a […]
The BMJ Today: Food everywhere
I visited an old friend recently and we realised that we’d spent two hours of the evening watching a television channel devoted to cookery programmes, while eating. Food is everywhere as two news stories in The BMJ show us. MPs on the parliamentary health committee were told, “People are exposed to an ‘astonishing’ amount of […]
The BMJ Today: The FDA and CDC’s disagreement over Tamiflu, and the spy who isn’t
If you remain uncertain about the benefits or otherwise of oseltamivir (Tamiflu), you may not be much helped by consulting and comparing the pronouncements and statements issued by the two leading healthcare authorities in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As Jeanne Lenzer […]