Publications by authors named "Bradley Fritz"

Background: Postoperative anxiety and depression can negatively affect surgical outcomes and patient wellbeing. This study aimed to quantify the incidence of postoperative worsening anxiety and depression symptoms and to identify preoperative predictors of these conditions.

Methods: This prospective, observational cohort study included 1168 patients undergoing surgery lasting >1 h with overnight admission at a university-affiliated quaternary referral centre.

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Background: Anaesthesiologists might be able to mitigate risk if they know which patients are at greatest risk for postoperative complications. This trial examined the impact of machine learning models on clinician risk assessment.

Methods: This single-centre, prospective, randomised clinical trial enrolled surgical patients aged ≥18 yr.

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Preoperative depression is an underappreciated comorbidity that has important implications for postoperative outcomes. Screening for symptoms of depression before surgery can identify patients with or without a previous diagnosis of depression who could benefit from perioperative interventions to improve mood. Preoperative screening programmes are feasible to implement, although care must be taken to ensure that patients who are most likely to benefit are included.

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Article Synopsis
  • Intraoperative EEG suppression during anesthesia can indicate excessive sedation and has been linked to higher rates of postoperative delirium, particularly after cardiac surgeries.
  • A randomized clinical trial involving 1140 adults aged 60 and older investigated if EEG-guided anesthesia could reduce the incidence of delirium compared to usual anesthesia care.
  • Results showed that there was no significant difference in postoperative delirium rates (around 18%) between the EEG-guided group and the usual care group, despite lower anesthetic doses and less time spent in EEG suppression in the EEG-guided group.
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Background: Anaesthesiology clinicians can implement risk mitigation strategies if they know which patients are at greatest risk for postoperative complications. Although machine learning models predicting complications exist, their impact on clinician risk assessment is unknown.

Methods: This single-centre randomised clinical trial enrolled patients age ≥18 undergoing surgery with anaesthesiology services.

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Background: Novel applications of telemedicine can improve care quality and patient outcomes. Telemedicine for intraoperative decision support has not been rigorously studied.

Methods: This single centre randomised clinical trial (RCT, clinicaltrials.

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Background: Older surgical patients with depression often experience poor postoperative outcomes. Poor outcomes may stem from brain-hazardous medications and subadequate antidepressant dosing.

Methods: This was a retrospective, observational cohort study covering the period between January 1, 2021 and December 31, 2021.

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Background:  Unplanned intensive care unit (ICU) admissions from medical/surgical floors and increased boarding times of ICU patients in the emergency department (ED) are common; approximately half of these are associated with adverse events. We explore the potential role of a tele-critical care consult service (TC3) in managing critically ill patients outside of the ICU and potentially preventing low-acuity unplanned admissions and also investigate its design and implementation needs.

Methods:  We conducted a qualitative study involving general observations of the units, shadowing of clinicians during patient transfers, and interviews with clinicians from the ED, medical/surgical floor units and their ICU counterparts, tele-ICU, and the rapid response team at a large academic medical center in St.

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Objective: An applied problem facing all areas of data science is harmonizing data sources. Joining data from multiple origins with unmapped and only partially overlapping features is a prerequisite to developing and testing robust, generalizable algorithms, especially in healthcare. This integrating is usually resolved using meta-data such as feature names, which may be unavailable or ambiguous.

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Background: Surgical patients with previous depression frequently experience postoperative depressive symptoms. This study's objective was to determine the feasibility of a placebo-controlled trial testing the impact of a sustained ketamine infusion on postoperative depressive symptoms.

Methods: This single-centre, triple-blind, placebo-controlled randomised clinical trial included adult patients with depression scheduled for inpatient surgery.

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Postoperative delirium (POD) has significant implications on morbidity, mortality, and health care expenditures. Monitoring electroencephalography (EEG) to adjust anesthetic management has gained interest as a strategy to mitigate POD. In this Pro-Con commentary article, the pro side supports the use of EEG to reduce POD, citing an empiric reduction in POD with processed EEG (pEEG)-guided general anesthesia found in several studies and recent meta-analysis.

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Objectives: Studies evaluating telemedicine critical care (TCC) have shown mixed results. We prospectively evaluated the impact of TCC implementation on risk-adjusted mortality among patients stratified by pre-TCC performance.

Design: Prospective, observational, before and after study.

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Importance: Telemedicine for clinical decision support has been adopted in many health care settings, but its utility in improving intraoperative care has not been assessed.

Objective: To pilot the implementation of a real-time intraoperative telemedicine decision support program and evaluate whether it reduces postoperative hypothermia and hyperglycemia as well as other quality of care measures.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This single-center pilot randomized clinical trial (Anesthesiology Control Tower-Feedback Alerts to Supplement Treatments [ACTFAST-3]) was conducted from April 3, 2017, to June 30, 2019, at a large academic medical center in the US.

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More than four million people die each year in the month following surgery, and many more experience complications such as acute kidney injury. Some of these outcomes may be prevented through early identification of at-risk patients and through intraoperative risk mitigation. Telemedicine has revolutionized the way at-risk patients are identified in critical care, but intraoperative telemedicine services are not widely used in anesthesiology.

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Background: Machine learning models can help anesthesiology clinicians assess patients and make clinical and operational decisions, but well-designed human-computer interfaces are necessary for machine learning model predictions to result in clinician actions that help patients. Therefore, the goal of this study was to apply a user-centered design framework to create a user interface for displaying machine learning model predictions of postoperative complications to anesthesiology clinicians.

Methods: Twenty-five anesthesiology clinicians (attending anesthesiologists, resident physicians, and certified registered nurse anesthetists) participated in a 3-phase study that included (phase 1) semistructured focus group interviews and a card sorting activity to characterize user workflows and needs; (phase 2) simulated patient evaluation incorporating a low-fidelity static prototype display interface followed by a semistructured interview; and (phase 3) simulated patient evaluation with concurrent think-aloud incorporating a high-fidelity prototype display interface in the electronic health record.

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A field spray drift experiment using florpyrauxifen-benzyl was conducted to measure drift from commercial ground and aerial applications, evaluate soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] impacts, and compare to United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) drift models.

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To reduce Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)-related mortality and morbidity, widely available oral COVID-19 treatments are urgently needed. Certain antidepressants, such as fluvoxamine or fluoxetine, may be beneficial against COVID-19. We included 388,945 adult inpatients who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 at 36 AP−HP (Assistance Publique−Hôpitaux de Paris) hospitals from 2 May 2020 to 2 November 2021.

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Antidepressants have previously been associated with better outcomes in patients hospitalized with COVID-19, but their effect on clinical deterioration among ambulatory patients has not been fully explored. The objective of this study was to assess whether antidepressant exposure was associated with reduced emergency department (ED) or hospital visits among ambulatory patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection. This retrospective cohort study included adult patients (N = 25 034) with a positive SARS-CoV-2 test performed in a non-hospital setting.

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Postoperative depressive symptoms are associated with pain, readmissions, death, and other undesirable outcomes. Ketamine produces rapid but transient antidepressant effects in the perioperative setting. Longer infusions confer lasting antidepressant activity in patients with treatment-resistant depression, but it is unknown whether a similar approach may produce a lasting antidepressant effect after surgery.

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Importance: Falls after elective inpatient surgical procedures are common and have physical, emotional, and financial consequences. Close interactions between patients and health care teams before and after surgical procedures may offer opportunities to address modifiable risk factors associated with falls.

Objective: To assess whether a multicomponent intervention that incorporates education, home medication review, and home safety assessment is associated with reductions in the incidence of falls after elective inpatient surgical procedures.

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Historical use of lead arsenate as a pesticide in former orchards of eastern Washington State (USA) has resulted in legacy lead (Pb) and arsenic (As) soil contamination. However, the impacts on plant growth in soils with residual Pb and As contamination have not yet been quantified. To this end, a comparative study of plant growth impacts was performed for native bluegrass (Poa secunda), invasive cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), and buttercrunch lettuce (Lactuca sativa).

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Background: COVID-positive outpatients may benefit from remote monitoring, but such a program often relies on smartphone apps. This may introduce racial and socio-economic barriers to participation. Offering multiple methods for participation may address these barriers.

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Background: Early-postemergence herbicide applications in the USA often include residual herbicides such as S-metolachlor to suppress late late-emerging Amaranthus spp. Although this practice benefits weed control, herbicide tankmixes can influence spray droplet size and drift potential during applications. The addition of S-metolachlor products to dicamba spray solutions generally decreases spray droplet size and increases spray drift potential.

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Current approaches to understanding medication ordering errors rely on relatively small manually captured error samples. These approaches are resource-intensive, do not scale for computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems, and are likely to miss important risk factors associated with medication ordering errors. Previously, we described a dataset of CPOE-based medication voiding accompanied by univariable and multivariable regression analyses.

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