Leadership development practices and hospital financial outcomes.

Affordable Care Act legislation is requiring leaders in US health systems to adapt to new and very different approaches to improving operating performance. Research from other industries suggests leadership development can be a helpful component of organizational change strategies; however, there is currently very little healthcare-specific research available to guide design and deployment. The goal of this exploratory study is to examine potential relationships between specific leadership development practices and health system financial outcomes.

Analysis of the evaluation of a new glucose meter with integrated self-management software and USB connectivity.

Glucose meter technology has not kept up with the advances that have occurred in other sectors in mobile and health care technology. A new device that combines strip-based capillary blood glucose monitoring and USB flash drive technology is evaluated in an industry-funded study in a cohort of patients and health care professionals. The expanded memory capacity of flash drives allows the software program to be stored on the device for analyzing the blood glucose readings in memory.

Analysis of studies that compare the dose accuracy of prefilled insulin pens.

Multiple industry-sponsored studies have been published about the accuracy of insulin delivery using prefilled insulin pens. Although the study by Weise and colleagues in this issue of Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology found that the Novo Nordisk device was slightly more accurate than the Sanofi-Aventis device, one can anticipate a Sanofi-Aventis-funded study that may find the opposite, because no internationally acceptable, publicly funded, unbiased scientific organization exists to perform head-to-head comparisons of drugs and devices in an evidence-based manner. Currently, clinicians are left on their own to determine whether a study on this topic was conducted in an accurate, unbiased manner.