Diabetes Centers' Participation in the T1D Exchange Quality Improvement Collaborative Advances Health Equity and Clinical Outcomes.

As the learning health network known as the T1D Exchange Quality Improvement Collaborative (T1DX-QI) has expanded on a significant scale to provide care for more than 120,000 people since its inception in 2016, assessing the quality improvement (QI) culture and monitoring clinical outcome improvements of participating centers has become vital to understanding the network's progress and success. Centers participating in the T1DX-QI complete regular QI culture self-assessments to quantify four evidence-based areas of culture: QI team structure, QI foundation, QI capacity, and QI success. This study builds on a previous baseline analysis to demonstrate self-reported improvements in T1DX-QI centers' QI culture from 2021 to 2022 and summarizes QI successes experienced by participating centers.

Blood Culture Use in Medical and Surgical Intensive Care Units and Wards.

Importance: Blood culture (BC) use benchmarks in US hospitals have not been defined.

Objective: To characterize BC use in adult intensive care units (ICUs) and wards in US hospitals.

Design, Setting, And Participants: A retrospective cross-sectional study of BC use in adult medical ICUs, medical-surgical ICUs, medical wards, and medical-surgical wards from acute care hospitals from the 4 US geographic regions was conducted.

Examining the effect of direct-from-blood bacterial testing on antibiotic administration and clinical outcomes: a protocol and statistical analysis plan for a pragmatic randomised trial.

Introduction: Patients with suspected bacterial infection frequently receive empiric, broad-spectrum antibiotics prior to pathogen identification due to the time required for bacteria to grow in culture. Direct-from-blood diagnostics identifying the presence or absence of bacteria and/or resistance genes from whole blood samples within hours of collection could enable earlier antibiotic optimisation for patients suspected to have bacterial infections. However, few randomised trials have evaluated the effect of using direct-from-blood bacterial testing on antibiotic administration and clinical outcomes.

Swab Testing to Optimize Pneumonia treatment with empiric Vancomycin (STOP-Vanc): study protocol for a randomized controlled trial.

Background: Vancomycin, an antibiotic with activity against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), is frequently included in empiric treatment for community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) despite the fact that MRSA is rarely implicated in CAP. Conducting polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing on nasal swabs to identify the presence of MRSA colonization has been proposed as an antimicrobial stewardship intervention to reduce the use of vancomycin. Observational studies have shown reductions in vancomycin use after implementation of MRSA colonization testing, and this approach has been adopted by CAP guidelines.

Comprehensive Image Quality Evaluation and Motion Phantom Studies of an Ultra-Fast (6-Second) Cone-Beam Computed Tomography Imaging System on a Ring Gantry Linear Accelerator.

Purpose: To evaluate the image quality of an ultrafast cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) system-Varian HyperSight.

Methods And Materials: In this evaluation, 5 studies were performed to assess the image quality of HyperSight CBCT. First, a HyperSight CBCT image quality evaluation was performed and compared with Siemens simulation-CT and Varian TrueBeam CBCT.