Validation of an electronic tool for flagging surgical site infections based on clinical practice patterns for triaging surveillance: Operational successes and barriers.

Background: Surveillance is an effective strategy for reducing surgical site infections (SSIs); however, current identification methods are resource-intensive. Therefore, we sought to validate an electronic SSI triaging tool for detection of probable infections and identify operational barriers and challenges.

Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted among all Veterans Affairs Surgical Quality Improvement Program (VASQIP)-reviewed surgeries at 2 Veterans Affairs medical centers from October 1, 2011-September 30, 2014.

When Sterile Processing Goes Down: An Economic Analysis of Alternative Strategies for Supporting the Service.

Given steam-quality challenges at our facility, the financial impact of options for reopening the sterile processing service unit were explored; duration of closure was the major driver of costs. Other potential negative effects of operating-room shutdowns include injury to facility reputation, loss of staff, loss of reimbursements, and harm to residency programs. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2017;38:1002-1004.

Mild traumatic brain injury: a neuropsychiatric approach to diagnosis, evaluation, and treatment.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a common occurrence in the United States, with an estimated incidence exceeding 1 million injuries per year. Cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and physical impairments are common sequelae of TBI and may, in a significant minority of patients, persist well into the late period following injury. The etiology of these symptoms in individuals with mild TBI is controversial, with hypotheses of postconcussive symptom formation variously ascribing greater or lesser weight to neural damage, pre- and/or post-injury psychological or psychiatric factors, somatization, malingering, or some combination of these.

Applications of the P50 evoked response to the evaluation of cognitive impairments after traumatic brain injury.

This article reviews the applications of the P50 evoked response to paired auditory stimuli (P50 ERP) in the study and evaluation of cognitive impairments after traumatic brain injury (TBI). The cholinergic hypothesis of cognitive impairment after TBI and the relationship of impaired auditory sensory gating to that hypothesis are presented. The neurobiology of impaired sensory gating, the relationship of that neurobiology to the P50 ERP, and the principles of P50 ERP recording are discussed.

Reduced hippocampal volume in association with p50 nonsuppression following traumatic brain injury.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) may produce persistently impaired auditory gating. This cholinergic-dependent, hippocampally mediated preattentive cognitive function that facilitates filtering of auditory stimuli may be indexed by the P50 evoked waveform to paired auditory stimuli. Abnormal P50 suppression post TBI is believed to result from injury to the hippocampus and/or its afferent cholinergic projections.