Text mining approach to predict hospital admissions using early medical records from the emergency department.

Objective: Emergency department (ED) overcrowding is a serious issue for hospitals. Early information on short-term inward bed demand from patients receiving care at the ED may reduce the overcrowding problem, and optimize the use of hospital resources. In this study, we use text mining methods to process data from early ED patient records using the SOAP framework, and predict future hospitalizations and discharges.

Forecasting Daily Volume and Acuity of Patients in the Emergency Department.

This study aimed at analyzing the performance of four forecasting models in predicting the demand for medical care in terms of daily visits in an emergency department (ED) that handles high complexity cases, testing the influence of climatic and calendrical factors on demand behavior. We tested different mathematical models to forecast ED daily visits at Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre (HCPA), which is a tertiary care teaching hospital located in Southern Brazil. Model accuracy was evaluated using mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), considering forecasting horizons of 1, 7, 14, 21, and 30 days.

Miracle drug: Brazil approves never-tested cancer medicine.

Background Brazil recently approved synthetic phosphoetanolamine, a popularly dubbed 'cancer pill', a substance that has been shown to kill cancer cells in lab animal models but was not yet formally accessed in humans, and thus despite the existence of any evidence of its efficacy and safety. Methods The authors describe the recent decision of Brazil to aprove phosphoetanolamine in the context of growing 'judicialization' to promote access to medicines and thus reinforcing a growing sense of legal uncertainty. Results The approval of phosphoetanolamine despite the existence of any evidence of its efficacy and safety represents to the authors one of the saddest and surrealistic episodes in Brazil's recent public health history.

High endemic levels of multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii among hospitals in southern Brazil.

Background: Most published data on multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumanii (MDR Ab) are derived from outbreaks. We report incidence trends on health care-acquired infections due to MDR Ab over a 12-month period in the city of Porto Alegre in southern Brazil.

Methods: Clinical and epidemiologic data were obtained from the local health care information system of the municipal health department.

Prevalence and acquisition of MRSA amongst patients admitted to a tertiary-care hospital in Brazil.

Background: There are few studies in Brazil that address baseline prevalence of MRSA colonization and associated risk factors at hospital admission, or the incidence of nosocomial colonization. We report a prospective study in a tertiary-care, university-affiliated hospital to implement a new MRSA control policy at the institution.

Methods: A cohort of randomly selected patients admitted to emergency and clinical wards at our hospital was followed until discharge.