Background: Optimal nurse staffing levels have been shown to impact patients' prognoses and safety, as well as staff burnout. The predominant method for calculating staffing levels has been patient-to-nurse (P/N) ratios and nursing hours per patient day. However, both methods fall short of addressing the dynamic nature of staffing needs that often fluctuate throughout the day as patients' clinical status changes and new patients are admitted or discharged from the unit.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Terminally ill patients benefit from earlier engagement in palliative care. However, this does not always occur. This project assessed if an already available risk score, the Care Assessment Needs (CAN) score, would be able to identify patients at greatest risk for mortality within 30 days of hospital admission within the Veterans Health Administration (VHA).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Computer assisted surgical navigation systems are designed to improve outcomes by providing clinicians with procedural guidance information. The use of new technologies, such as mixed reality, offers the potential for more intuitive, efficient, and accurate procedural guidance. The goal of this study is to assess the positional accuracy and consistency of a clinical mixed reality system that utilizes commercially available wireless head-mounted displays (HMDs), custom software, and localization instruments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: In-hospital falls are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has designated fall prevention as a major focus area. The objective of this report is to assess the performance of a new sensor-enabled wearable system to prevent patient falls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Augmented reality (AR) has a wide range of potential applications to enhance health care. Understanding how the introduction of a new technology may impact employees is essential for overall health care system success.
Methods: Survey responses were obtained before and after a health care-focused interactive AR demonstration at a US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical center.
There is growing evidence that thrombotic and inflammatory pathways contribute to the severity of COVID-19. Common medications such as aspirin, that mitigate these pathways, may decrease COVID-19 mortality. This retrospective assessment was designed to quantify the correlation between pre-diagnosis aspirin and mortality for COVID-19 positive patients in our care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe sudden emergence of COVID-19 has brought significant challenges to the care of Veterans. An improved ability to predict a patient's clinical course would facilitate optimal care decisions, resource allocation, family counseling, and strategies for safely easing distancing restrictions. The Care Assessment Need (CAN) score is an existing risk assessment tool within the Veterans Health Administration (VA), and produces a score from 0 to 99, with a higher score correlating to a greater risk.
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