Toolkit to Increase Provider Knowledge, Comfort, and Adoption of POLST: Portable Medical Orders in a Primary Care Setting.

Background: POLST-Portable Medical Orders-abbreviated as POLST, is a nationwide initiative to help providers document and meet a patient's end-of-life wishes.

Problem: Provider completion of POLST documents in primary care can promote continuity and implementation of patient preferences at the end of life in community-dwelling adults. Educating and providing a clinical process to support POLST use may improve implementation.

An integrated model of multimorbidity and symptom science.

Background: Prevalence and complexity of persons with multiple chronic conditions (MCC), also known as multimorbidity, are shifting clinical practice from a single disease focus to one considering MCC and symptoms. Although symptoms are intricately bound to concepts inherent in MCC science, symptoms are largely ignored in multimorbidity research and literature.

Purpose: Introduce an Integrated Model of Multimorbidity and Symptom Science.

Fostering Academic-Clinical Research Partnerships.

Academic-clinical research partnerships can benefit academic and clinical partners when goals are clearly articulated and mutually determined and include increased research dissemination and lower research costs. This article explores the history of academic-clinical research partnerships and discusses the drivers of collaborative academic-clinical research relationships, resources from academia and clinical sites, and sustainability of collaborative partnerships. Through collaboration, academic-clinical partners can improve clinical outcomes and reduce healthcare costs.

The malleability of spatial skills: a meta-analysis of training studies.

Having good spatial skills strongly predicts achievement and attainment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields (e.g., Shea, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2001; Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2009).

Learning fine-grained and category information in navigable real-world space.

Spatial judgments are affected by both fine-grained and categorical knowledge. We investigated whether, and how, the two forms of knowledge are learned in real-world, navigable space, as well as the time course of learning each type of knowledge. Participants were Northwestern University undergraduates who estimated the locations of buildings and other landmarks on campus.

Reliability and validity of the Pediatric Intensity Level of Therapy (PILOT) scale: a measure of the use of intracranial pressure-directed therapies.

Objective: To test the reliability and validity of the Pediatric Intensity Level of Therapy (PILOT) scale, a novel measure of overall therapeutic effort directed at controlling intracranial pressure (ICP) in the setting of severe (Glasgow Coma Scale of
Design: Case-control study via retrospective review of medical records.

Setting: Tertiary-care, university-based children's hospital intensive care unit.