User Information Sharing and Hospital Website Privacy Policies.

Importance: Hospital websites frequently use tracking technologies that transfer user information to third parties. It is not known whether hospital websites include privacy policies that disclose relevant details regarding tracking.

Objective: To determine whether hospital websites have accessible privacy policies and whether those policies contain key information related to third-party tracking.

Identifying low acuity Emergency Department visits with a machine learning approach: The low acuity visit algorithms (LAVA).

Objective: To improve the performance of International Classification of Disease (ICD) code rule-based algorithms for identifying low acuity Emergency Department (ED) visits by using machine learning methods and additional covariates.

Data Sources: We used secondary data on ED visits from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Survey (NHAMCS), from 2016 to 2020.

Study Design: We established baseline performance metrics with seven published algorithms consisting of International Classification of Disease, Tenth Revision codes used to identify low acuity ED visits.

Patient perceptions of behavioral flags in the emergency department: A qualitative analysis.

Background: To combat increasing levels of violence in the emergency department (ED), hospitals have implemented several safety measures, including behavioral flags. These electronic health record (EHR)-based notifications alert future clinicians of past incidents of potentially threatening patient behavior, but observed racial disparities in their placement may unintentionally introduce bias in patient care. Little is known about how patients perceive these flags and the disparities that have been found in their placement.

Differential Mortality Among Heart Failure Patients Across Different COVID-19 Surges in New York City.

Learning from the healthcare system's response to the COVID-19 pandemic is essential to better prepare for potential future crises. We sought to assess mortality rates for patients admitted for acute decompensated heart failure (HF) and to analyze which factors demonstrated a statistically significant correlation with this primary endpoint. We performed a retrospective analysis of patients hospitalized with a primary diagnosis of acute decompensated HF within the New York City Health and Hospitals 11-hospital system across the different COVID surge periods.

Costs of Care for Operative and Nonoperative Management of Emergency General Surgery Conditions.

Objective: Many emergency general surgery (EGS) conditions can be managed operatively or nonoperatively, with outcomes that vary by diagnosis. We hypothesized that operative management would lead to higher in-hospital costs but to cost savings over time.

Background: EGS conditions account for $28 billion in health care costs in the United States annually.

Medical journals and advertiser tracking-Consequences for patients, clinicians, and editors.

Medical journal websites frequently contain tracking code that transfers data about journal readers to third parties. These data give drug, device, and other medical product companies a potentially powerful resource for targeting advertisements and other marketing materials to journal readers based on unique attributes and medical interests that can be inferred from the articles they read. Thus, while editors may strictly regulate the content of advertisements that such companies place in their journals' pages, they simultaneously provide those companies with the means to target readers in other forums, possibly in ways that subvert editorial guidelines.

National Cohort Study of Resource Utilization in Older Adults With Emergency General Surgery Conditions.

Introduction: Prior studies have sought to describe Emergency General Surgery (EGS) burden, but a detailed description of resource utilization for both operative and nonoperative management of EGS conditions has not been undertaken.

Methods: Patient and hospital characteristics were extracted from Medicare data, 2015-2018. Operations, nonsurgical procedures, and other resources (i.

Qualitative Perspectives of Emergency Nurses on Electronic Health Record Behavioral Flags to Promote Workplace Safety.

Importance: Emergency nurses experience high levels of workplace violence during patient interactions. Little is known about the efficacy of behavioral flags, which are notifications embedded within electronic health records (EHRs) as a tool to promote clinician safety.

Objective: To explore the perspectives of emergency nurses on EHR behavioral flags, workplace safety, and patient care.

Widespread Third-Party Tracking On Hospital Websites Poses Privacy Risks For Patients And Legal Liability For Hospitals.

Computer code that transfers data to third parties (third-party tracking) is common across the web and is subject to few federal privacy regulations. We determined the presence of potentially privacy-compromising data transfers to third parties on a census of US nonfederal acute care hospital websites, and we used descriptive statistics and regression analyses to determine the hospital characteristics associated with a greater number of third-party data transfers. We found that third-party tracking is present on 98.

Prevalence of Behavioral Flags in the Electronic Health Record Among Black and White Patients Visiting the Emergency Department.

Importance: Behavioral flags in the electronic health record (EHR) are designed to alert clinicians of potentially unsafe or aggressive patients. These flags may introduce bias, and understanding how they are used is important to ensure equitable care.

Objective: To investigate the incidence of behavioral flags and assess whether there were differences between Black and White patients and whether the flags were associated with differences in emergency department (ED) clinical care.

Health System Structure: An Opportunity to Address Structural Racism and Discrimination.

Objective: To examine the role of hub-and-spoke systems as a factor in structural racism and discrimination.

Background: Health systems are often organized in a "hub-and-spoke" manner to centralize complex surgical care to 1 high-volume hospital. Although the surgical health care disparities are well described across health care systems, it is not known how they seem across a single system's hospitals.

The combined effects of physical frailty and cognitive impairment on emergency department- versus direct-admission hospitalizations.

Background: We aimed to study whether physical frailty and cognitive impairment (CI) increase the risk of recurrent hospitalizations in older adults, independent of comorbidity, and disability.

Methods: Two thousand five hundred forty-nine community-dwelling participants from the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS) with 3 + years of continuous Medicare coverage from linked claims data were included. We used the marginal means/rates recurrent events model to investigate the association of baseline CI (mild CI or dementia) and physical frailty, separately and synergistically, with the number of all-source vs.

Prevalence of Third-party Tracking on Medical Journal Websites.

This cross-sectional study investigates web tracking prevalence and characteristics on medical journal websites.

Algorithms identifying low-acuity emergency department visits: A review and validation study.

Objective: To characterize and validate the landscape of algorithms that use International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes to identify low-acuity emergency department (ED) visits.

Data Sources: Publicly available ED data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS).

Study Design: We systematically searched for studies that specify algorithms consisting of ICD codes that identify preventable or low-acuity ED visits.

Addressing Online Health Privacy Risks for Older Adults: A Perspective on Ethical Considerations and Recommendations.

The rise in online health information seeking among older adults promises significant benefits but also presents potentially serious privacy risks. In light of these risks, we argue that ongoing research and advocacy aimed at promoting online health information seeking among older adults must be coupled with efforts to identify and address threats to their online privacy. We first detail how internet users reveal sensitive health information to third parties through seemingly innocuous web browsing.