Long-Term Sustainability and Adaptation of I-PASS Handovers.

Background: Inadequate communication during transitions of care is a major health care quality and safety vulnerability. In 2013 Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) embarked on a comprehensive training program using a standardized handover system (I-PASS) that had been shown to reduce adverse events by 30% even when not completely executed on each patient. In this cross-sectional study, the authors sought to characterize handover practices six years later.

The Safety of Inpatient Health Care.

Background: Adverse events during hospitalization are a major cause of patient harm, as documented in the 1991 Harvard Medical Practice Study. Patient safety has changed substantially in the decades since that study was conducted, and a more current assessment of harm during hospitalization is warranted.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study to assess the frequency, preventability, and severity of patient harm in a random sample of admissions from 11 Massachusetts hospitals during the 2018 calendar year.

Interdisciplinary Patient Tracers: Routine, Systematic Safety Surveillance.

Patient tracers and leadership WalkRounds proactively identify quality and safety issues. However, these programs have been inconsistent in application, results, and sustainability. The goal was to identify a more consistent and efficient approach to survey health care facilities.

Adopting RCA: The Interrater Reliability of Safety Assessment Codes.

Safety assessment codes (SACs) are one method to evaluate adverse events and determine the need for a root cause analysis. Few facilities currently use SACs, and there is no literature examining their interrater reliability. Two independent raters assigned frequency, actual harm, and potential harm ratings to a sample of patient safety reports.

Eculizumab for drug-induced de novo posttransplantation thrombotic microangiopathy: A case report.

De novo thrombotic microangiopathy (TMA) following renal transplantation is a severe complication associated with high rates of allograft failure. Several immunosuppressive agents are associated with TMA. Conventional approaches to managing this entity, such as withdrawal of the offending agent and/or plasmapheresis, often offer limited help, with high rates of treatment failure and graft loss.

Responsivity to food stimuli in obese and lean binge eaters using functional MRI.

Functional neuroimaging was employed to study 10 obese and 10 lean healthy young right-handed women, divided equally into binge and non-binge eaters. Subjects were presented with visual and auditory stimuli of binge type foods, non-binge type foods, and non-food stimuli in the fMRI scanner. Brain areas activated by both the visual and auditory stimuli across all individual subjects within a particular group was observed only for the binge food stimuli in the obese binge eaters, in the right premotor area, involved in planning of motor behavior.