Introduction: Being faced with multimorbidity (i.e., being diagnosed with at least two chronic conditions), is not only demanding in terms of following complicated medical regimes and changing health behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAims: There is a lack of national and international publicly available long-term survival outcome data from individual healthcare providers in medical oncology. In this study, the overall survival at a medium-sized medical oncology service at Olten Cantonal Hospital was evaluated and compared as a local benchmark report with national data from the Swiss Cancer Registries. Furthermore, adherence to treatment guidelines was investigated as an additional quality indicator.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF: Remote patient monitoring (RPM) of vital signs and symptoms for lung transplant recipients (LTRs) has become increasingly relevant in many situations. Nevertheless, RPM research integrating multisensory home monitoring in LTRs is scarce. We developed a novel multisensory home monitoring device and tested it in the context of COVID-19 vaccinations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDizziness - What Next? Dizziness is a very common symptom with an extensive differential diagnosis that includes both benign and serious conditions. Acute care physicians must be able to distinguish the majority of patients with self-limiting benign complaints from those with serious conditions. Our structured approach is intended to serve as a guide for acute medicine.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Research integrating multisensory home-monitoring in respiratory disease is scarce. Therefore, we created a novel multisensory home-monitoring device tailored for long-term respiratory disease management (named the CAir-Desk). We hypothesize that recent technological accomplishments can be integrated into a multisensory participant-driven platform.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: A new generation of medical students, Generation Z (Gen Z), is becoming the predominant population in medical schools and will join the workforce in a few years' time. Medicine has undergone serious changes in high-income countries recently. Therefore, it is unclear how attractive the medical profession still is for high school students of Gen Z.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Multimorbidity is challenging not only for the patient but also for the romantic partner. Strategies for interpersonal emotion regulation like disclosing to the partner are supposed to play a major role in the psychosocial adjustment to multimorbidity. Research has often focused on disease-related disclosure, even though disclosing thoughts and feelings related to mundane, everyday life occurrences might also play a role in coadjustment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Infective endocarditis (IE) caused by gram-negative bacilli is rare. However, the incidence of this severe infection is rising because of the increasing number of persons at risk, such as patients with immunosuppression or with cardiac implantable devices and prosthetic valves. The diagnosis of IE is often difficult, particularly when microorganisms such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which rarely cause this infection, are involved.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Multimorbidity can be defined as the co-occurrence of two or more chronic medical conditions in one person. Within the diagnostic process, accurately detecting a multimorbid disease pattern still poses a major challenge for most physicians, and is known as a source of diagnostic uncertainty.
Objective: We investigated, how sensitive, confident, and accurate physicians are in diagnosing multimorbid versus monomorbid patients.
Aims: A new generation of physicians, millennials (also known as Generation Y), are entering residency programmes in internal medicine, and these young men and women learn and work in ways that are different from those of past generations. The aim of the present study was to investigate aspects contributing to the attractiveness to young residents of a career in general internal medicine (GIM) compared with medical subspecialties (SUB).
Methods: In a cross-sectional online survey, we included residents working in residency facilities in GIM in German-speaking Switzerland.
Background Andaims: Vitamin and iron deficiencies are common in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) as a result of chronic intestinal inflammation, increase in demand, or dietary restrictions. Here, we assessed the frequency of complications in relation to deficiency of iron, folate acid, and vitamin B12 in patients enrolled in the nationwide Swiss Inflammatory Bowel Disease Cohort Study (SIBDCS).
Methods: A total of 2666 patients were included in the study, 1558 with Crohn's disease (CD) and 1108 with ulcerative colitis (UC).
Background: Gallstones and kidney stones are known complications of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). Risk factors have been insufficiently studied and explanatory studies date back up to 30 years. It remains unclear, whether improved treatment options also influenced risk factors for these complications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Chronic pain is common in multimorbid patients. However, little is known about the implications of chronic pain and analgesic treatment on multimorbid patients. This study aimed to assess chronic pain therapy with regard to the interaction potential in a sample of inpatients with multiple chronic conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Chronic conditions often require multiple medication intake. However, past research has focused on assessing overall adherence or adherence to a single index medication only. This study explored adherence measures for multiple medication intake, and in daily life, among patients with multiple chronic conditions (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMC Med Inform Decis Mak
October 2016
Background: Decision-making processes in a medical setting are complex, dynamic and under time pressure, often with serious consequences for a patient's condition.
Objective: The principal aim of the present study was to trace and map the individual diagnostic process of real medical cases using a Decision Process Matrix [DPM]).
Methods: The naturalistic decision-making process of 11 residents and a total of 55 medical cases were recorded in an emergency department, and a DPM was drawn up according to a semi-structured technique following four steps: 1) observing and recording relevant information throughout the entire diagnostic process, 2) assessing options in terms of suspected diagnoses, 3) drawing up an initial version of the DPM, and 4) verifying the DPM, while adding the confidence ratings.
We investigated the relations of self-rated omission errors (i.e., forgetting to take one's medication) and commission errors (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHistory: A 36-year-old man with a history of PR3-ANCA positive granulomatosis with polyangiitis presented with chest pain at the emergency department. Due to his underlying disease, he was treated with Rituximab in regular intervals. The last Rituximab infusion was admitted one day before presentation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCheck-up examinations, or periodic health examinations (PHEs), have gained in importance during the last decades and are nowadays among the most common reasons for consultations in primary care settings. The aim of PHEs is to identify risk factors and early signs of disease, but also to prevent future illness by early intervention. Therefore, each PHE should include counselling, immunisation and physical examination according to the patient's age and gender.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Acute chest pain (ACP) is a leading cause of hospital emergency unit consultation. As there are various underlying conditions, ranging from musculoskeletal disorders to acute coronary syndrome (ACS), thorough clinical diagnostics are warranted. The aim of this prospective study was to assess whether reproducible chest wall tenderness (CWT) on palpation in patients with ACP can help to rule out ACS.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGastrointestinal (GI) bleeding is a frequently encountered and very serious problem in emergency room patients who are currently being treated with anticoagulant or antiplatelet medications. There is, however, a lack of clinical practice guidelines about how to respond to these situations. The goal of this study was to find published articles that contain specific information about how to safely adjust anticoagulant and antiplatelet therapy when GI bleeding occurs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: We recently reported about the derivation of a diagnostic probability function for acute coronary syndrome (ACS). The present study aims to validate the probability function as a rule-out criterion in a new sample of patients.
Methods: 186 patients presenting with chest pain and/or dyspnea at one of the three participating hospitals' emergency rooms in Switzerland were included in the study.