Beyond the medical home: Special Care Family Academy for children and youth.

Children and youth with special health care needs require more health care and related services and consequently incur more costs than other individuals. Implementation of the "medical home" concept has benefitted children with special needs, resulting in fewer unmet medical needs and more consistent health care delivery. As advances in health care have enabled an increasingly higher percentage of children with special needs to live far into adulthood, the transition from adolescence to adulthood poses new challenges in obtaining medical care, education, job training, and employment opportunities.

An analysis of clinical outcomes and costs of a long term acute care hospital.

Objective: Compare clinical outcomes and costs in a study group of long-term acute care hospital (LTCH) patients with a control group of LTCH-eligible patients in an acute care hospital. LTCHs were created to provide post-acute care services not available at other post-acute settings. This is based on the premise that these patients would otherwise have stayed at acute care hospitals as high-cost outliers.

Inhaled sodium pyruvate improved FEV1 and decreased expired breath levels of nitric oxide in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Exogenously administered sodium pyruvate has a variety of biological effects including antioxidant/anti-inflammatory effects. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is an inflammatory disease of the airways mediated in part by reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS). The current therapies for COPD have limited efficacy.

Post-ICU mechanical ventilation at 23 long-term care hospitals: a multicenter outcomes study.

Study Objectives: This multicenter study was undertaken to characterize the population of ventilator-dependent patients admitted to long-term care hospitals (LTCHs) with weaning programs, and to report treatments, complications, weaning outcome, discharge disposition, and survival in these patients.

Design: Observational study with concurrent data collection.

Setting: Twenty-three LTCHs in the United States.

Ventilator-dependent survivors of catastrophic illness transferred to 23 long-term care hospitals for weaning from prolonged mechanical ventilation.

Study Objectives: This multicenter study was undertaken to characterize the population of ventilator-dependent patients admitted to long-term care hospitals (LTCHs) for weaning from mechanical ventilation.

Design: Observational study with concurrent data collection. Characteristics of the LTCHs were also surveyed.