Recruitment of older adult-caregiver dyads during the COVID-19 pandemic: an example from a study to evaluate a novel activities of daily living (ADL) sensor system.

Under ideal circumstances, recruitment of older adult-caregiver dyads to dementia research is challenging. The COVID-19 pandemic introduced additional barriers to recruitment, necessitating swift adjustments to pre-pandemic recruitment strategies and schedules. This brief research report describes the challenges, yield, and cost of recruiting older adult-caregiver dyads to an 18-month observational research study during COVID-19.

Evaluation of a Military Global Health Engagement Mission for Critical Wartime Surgical Specialty Readiness.

Introduction: Surgical volume at Military Treatment Facilities (MTFs) has been gradually decreasing for roughly the past 2 decades. The Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSA) Clinical Readiness Program linked surgical volume and readiness using a tool known as the KSA metric. However, the extent to which military medical missions contribute to the readiness of critical wartime specialties has not been evaluated using this metric.

Reduction of Very Rapid Emergency Transfers to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.

Introduction: Emergency transfers are associated with increased inpatient pediatric mortality. Therefore, interventions to improve system-level situational awareness were utilized to decrease a subset of emergency transfers that occurred within four hours of admission to an inpatient medical-surgical unit called very rapid emergency transfers (VRET). Specifically, we aimed to increase the days between VRET from non-ICU inpatient units from every 10 days to every 25 days over 1 year.

Full-length isoform concatenation sequencing to resolve cancer transcriptome complexity.

Background: Cancers exhibit complex transcriptomes with aberrant splicing that induces isoform-level differential expression compared to non-diseased tissues. Transcriptomic profiling using short-read sequencing has utility in providing a cost-effective approach for evaluating isoform expression, although short-read assembly displays limitations in the accurate inference of full-length transcripts. Long-read RNA sequencing (Iso-Seq), using the Pacific Biosciences (PacBio) platform, can overcome such limitations by providing full-length isoform sequence resolution which requires no read assembly and represents native expressed transcripts.