Optimizing nurse practitioner productivity within the Veterans Health Administration.

Background: Nurse practitioners (NPs) provide high-quality, comprehensive health care at Veterans Health Administration (VHA) medical centers in various practice settings. Accurately determining the productivity of NPs is essential to understanding their overall contribution to veteran care. There is a lack of understanding of the contributors to the variability among VHA medical centers regarding their processes for capturing these data.

Racial disparities in the utilization of invasive neuromodulation devices for the treatment of drug-resistant focal epilepsy.

Racial disparities affect multiple dimensions of epilepsy care including epilepsy surgery. This study aims to further explore these disparities by determining the utilization of invasive neuromodulation devices according to race and ethnicity in a multicenter study of patients living with focal drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE). We performed a post hoc analysis of the Human Epilepsy Project 2 (HEP2) data.

A Cost Comparison for Telehealth Utilization in the Kidney Transplant Waitlist Evaluation Process.

Background: There have been limited publications on telehealth utilization in transplantation with no prior reports of telehealth-related costs for pretransplant evaluations. The aim of this study is to compare costs throughout the evaluation process for those patients assessed initially by telehealth with those seen in-person.

Methods: All patients approved for kidney transplant waitlist evaluation at our center from March 2013 thru May 2016 with decisions were included in this study.

Implementation of telehealth is associated with improved timeliness to kidney transplant waitlist evaluation.

Introduction The United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) National Transplant Program has made efforts to improve access by introducing Web-based referrals and telehealth. The aims of this study were to describe the programmatic implementation and evaluate the effectiveness of new technology on the timeliness to kidney transplant evaluation at a VA medical centre. Methods Between 1 January 2009 and 31 May 2016, 835 patients were approved for evaluation.

Protection of the vehicle cab environment against bacteria, fungi and endotoxins in composting facilities.

Microbial quality of air inside vehicle cabs is a major occupational health risk management issue in composting facilities. Large differences and discrepancies in protection factors between vehicles and between biological agents have been reported. This study aimed at estimating the mean protection efficiency of the vehicle cab environment against bioaerosols with higher precision.