Family Input for Quality and Safety (FIQS): Using mobile technology for in-hospital reporting from families and patients.

Objective: Despite three decades of effort, ensuring inpatient safety remains elusive. Patients and family members are a potential source of safety observations, but systems gathering these are limited. Our goal was to test a system to gather safety observations from hospitalized patients and their family members via a real-time mobile health tool.

Keeping Time: Implementing Appointment-based Family-centered Rounds.

Background: Family-centered rounds (FCRs) provide many benefits over traditional rounds, including higher patient satisfaction, and shared mental models among staff. These benefits can only be achieved when key members of the care team are present and engaged. We aimed to improve patient engagement and satisfaction with our existing bedside rounds by designing a new FCR process.

Association between adaptations to ACGME duty hour requirements, length of stay, and costs.

Study Objective: To determine whether adaptations to comply with Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) duty hour requirements are associated with changes in total cost and length of stay.

Design: Retrospective, interrupted time-series cohort study using concurrent control patients.

Setting: UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital, San Francisco, CA.

Treatment of hypokalemic periodic paralysis with topiramate.

Hypokalemic periodic paralysis (hypoPP), the most common form of periodic paralysis, is a disorder characterized by attacks of transient muscle weakness associated with a drop in serum potassium level.The mainstay of treatment is potassium supplementation and drugs that inhibit the enzyme carbonic anhydrase. In this report we describe 11-year-old twins with hypoPP who were treated with topiramate, an anti-epileptic drug known to have carbonic anhydrase inhibitory properties.