Preoperative Exposure to Fine Particulate Matter and Risk of Postoperative Complications: A Single Center Observational Cohort Bayesian Analysis.

Background: While exposure to fine particulate matter air pollution (PM ) is known to cause adverse health effects, its impact on postoperative outcomes in US adults remains understudied. Perioperative exposure to PM may induce inflammation that interacts insidiously with the surgical stress response, leading to higher postoperative complications.

Methods: We conducted a single center, retrospective cohort study using data from 49,615 surgical patients living along Utah's Wasatch Front and who underwent elective surgical procedures at a single academic medical center from 2016-2018.

Employee Group Coaching Program for University and Hospital Employees During COVID-19: A Feasibility Study.

Background: Workplace wellbeing programs can be beneficial but range widely in approach. A group coaching model offers numerous benefits.

Objective: To evaluate feasibility of group coaching for employees during COVID-19.

Stan and BART for Causal Inference: Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Using the Power of Stan and the Flexibility of Machine Learning.

A wide range of machine-learning-based approaches have been developed in the past decade, increasing our ability to accurately model nonlinear and nonadditive response surfaces. This has improved performance for inferential tasks such as estimating average treatment effects in situations where standard parametric models may not fit the data well. These methods have also shown promise for the related task of identifying heterogeneous treatment effects.

Antiemetic Prophylaxis as a Marker of Health Care Disparities in the National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry.

Background: US health care disparities persist despite repeated countermeasures. Research identified race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status as factors, mediated through individual provider and/or systemic biases; little research exists in anesthesiology. We investigated antiemetic prophylaxis as a surrogate marker for anesthesia quality by individual providers because antiemetics are universally available, indicated contingent on patient characteristics (gender, age, etc), but independent of comorbidities and not yet impacted by regulatory or financial constraints.

A pragmatic trial to improve adherence with scheduled appointments in an inner-city pain clinic by human phone calls in the patient's preferred language.

Study Objective: We investigated if human reminder phone calls in the patient's preferred language increase adherence with scheduled appointments in an inner-city chronic pain clinic. We hypothesized that language and cultural incongruence is the underlying mechanism to explain poor attendance at clinic appointments in underserved Hispanic populations.

Design: Pragmatic randomized controlled clinical trial SETTING: Innercity academic chronic pain clinic with a diverse, predominantly African-American and Hispanic population PATIENTS: All (n=963) adult patients with a scheduled first appointment between October 2014 and October 2015 at the Montefiore Pain Center in the Bronx, New York were enrolled.