Clinical impact of a real-time PCR assay for rapid identification of staphylococcal bacteremia.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of real-time PCR reporting both on timely identification of clustered Gram-positive cocci (GPC) in blood cultures and on appropriate antibiotic treatment. This retrospective, interventional cohort study evaluated inpatients with blood cultures positive for GPC in the pre-PCR (15 January 2009 to 14 January 2010) and post-PCR (15 January 2010 to 14 January 2011) periods. Post-PCR implementation, laboratory services completed batched PCR; results other than methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) were reported in the electronic medical record without additional interventions.

Hospitalists assess the causes of early hospital readmissions.

Background: Hospital readmissions are receiving increasing attention as an indicator of health care quality and waste. Hospitalists provide a unique perspective on the underlying processes that result in acute care readmissions and the extent to which readmissions can be prevented.

Objective: The study assessed the views of hospitalists on the preventability of readmissions and the most important ways to prevent future readmissions.

Raising premiums and other costs for Oregon health plan enrollees drove many to drop out.

The Oregon Health Plan was created to be a sustainable program that could weather budgetary storms without having to cut enrollees from Medicaid. A 2003 redesign of the program increased premiums, raised cost sharing, and imposed rigid premium payment deadlines for members in the "Standard" version of the program but not for members of the "Plus" version. This paper adds two years of longitudinal data to a previous study on the impacts of these changes.

Reliable detection of deamidated peptides from lens crystallin proteins using changes in reversed-phase elution times and parent ion masses.

Identifying deamidated peptides using low-resolution mass spectrometry is difficult because traditional database search programs cannot accurately detect modified peptides when the mass differences are only 0.984 Da. In this study, we utilized differential reversed-phase elution behavior of deamidated and corresponding unmodified peptide forms to significantly improve deamidation detection on a low-resolution LCQ ion trap instrument.

Two-dimensional liquid chromatography study of the human whole saliva proteome.

The human whole saliva proteome was investigated using two-dimensional liquid chromatography (2-DLC). The 2-DLC study was able to identify, with high confidence, 102 proteins including most known salivary proteins (35), and a large number of common serum proteins (67). Peptides from proline-rich proteins, abundant in saliva, had unusual cleavage sites and were frequently only partially tryptic.