The safe use of negative-pressure wound therapy.

The Pennsylvania Patient Safety Reporting System is a confidential, statewide Internet reporting system to which all Pennsylvania hospitals, outpatient-surgery facilities, and birthing centers, as well as some abortion facilities, must file information on medical errors. Safety Monitor is a column from Pennsylvania's Patient Safety Authority, the authority that informs nurses on issues that can affect patient safety and presents strategies they can easily integrate into practice. For more information on the authority, visit www.

The consequence of secret prices: the politics of physician preference items.

This paper assesses the implications for policy of recent aggressive efforts by manufacturers to enforce price-confidentiality clauses in contracts with hospitals for purchases of physician preference items (PPIs) such as implantable medical devices. Secrecy clauses prevent hospitals from revealing prices to third parties that help them negotiate prices and to surgeons who specify which device brands and models hospitals purchase. Litigation focused the attention of journalists and policymakers on problems that result from the asymmetry of information between buyers and sellers in the market for PPIs.