Socioeconomic status and survival from ventricular fibrillation out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

Purpose: Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is a major cause of death in the United States. How individual-level socioeconomic status (SES) influences survival is uncertain.

Methods: The investigation is a retrospective cohort study of adults who suffered OHCA and presented with a shockable rhythm in a metropolitan county from January 1, 1999-December 31, 2005.

Sounding off on social media: the ethics of patient storytelling in the modern era.

Use of social networking programs like Facebook and Twitter, which enable the public sharing of diverse content over the Internet, has risen dramatically in recent years. Although health professionals have faced consequences for clearly unethical online behavior, a relatively unexamined practice among medical students is the disclosure of patient care stories on social media in a manner that is technically compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, yet is ethically questionable. In this Perspective, the authors review three such cases in which students do not specifically reveal a patient's identity but share details of a personal nature, motivated by a variety of intentions (e.