A blog for and about medical directors
Having patients with COVID-19 in the hospital can be disturbing to the doctors, nurses, and respiratory therapists who take care of them. The good news is that isolation procedures work and proper use of personal protective equipment can dramatically reduce the chance of getting healthcare workers infected. Even though that risk is low, there are […]
Hospitals have a love-hate relationship with verbal orders. On the one hand, they can expedite care to the patient and can save physicians time. On the other hand, they can increase medical errors. Some groups believe strongly that the goal should be to have zero verbal orders whereas others believe that there should be no […]
Suicide is the master thief. He steals from our family, from our friends, and from those that we admire. These are the faces of some of the lives that he has stolen. Although we have greater fear of his brother homicide, suicide takes more lives each year than homicide. Sometimes, suicide slips into our homes […]
Recently, one of our primary care physicians was telling me about one of his patients, an 85 year-old woman who had a knee replacement at a different hospital here in Columbus. She was in the hospital for 4 days after her surgery but was very slow to recover and was determined to be unsafe for […]
A small article about trauma in the journal JAMA last week has big implications about the business of hospital finances. In short, it shows that the U.S. spends more on trauma than any other group of diseases… and the implication is that in the future, financially healthy hospitals will need to be trauma centers. The […]
When the average person thinks of donating blood, the first words that come to mind are “Red Cross”. However, the American Red Cross only supplies about 40% of transfused blood in the United States. What most people don’t realize is that the U.S. uses a free-market approach to maintain its blood supply with the result […]
As an intern, the one specialty I was sure I did not want to go into was pulmonary. The inpatients all had either COPD or lung cancer brought on by the bad life choice of smoking, the sputum they brought up was gross, and there didn’t seem like there was anything we could do for […]
Hospitals are under enormous pressure to reduce length of stay. Since the hospital is paid by the diagnosis and not by the number of days a patient spends in the hospital, the shorter the length of stay, the higher the financial margin. In addition, if the hospital is frequently full to capacity, it is far […]
On Christmas Day, an article was published in JAMA that confirmed what many of us had suspected for a long time. When hospitals are penalized for high 30-day readmission rates, patients are more likely to die. The background is that 30-day readmission rates in U.S. hospitals are disturbingly common and very expensive. In a 2009 […]
I am on this earth because of influenza. This is the 100th year anniversary of the influenza epidemic of 1918 that infected 1/3 of the word’s population and killed 1 out of every 10 people infected. One of those people was my grandmother’s first husband. She was a nurse at a hospital in Durham, North […]