1. A new chemical compound studied by scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City may drive insulin-producing beta cells to reproduce, healing some damage done to the pancreas by diabetes.
2. Using a preoperative methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus decontamination protocol may help reduce surgical site infections by more than 50 percent, according to one study.
3. Researchers analyzed about 2,600 patient hospitalizations for severe sepsis and found, out of the 1,115 survivors who were rehospitalized, ambulatory care sensitive conditions were responsible for 22 percent.
4. Using advanced clinical decision support tools reduces mortality for pneumonia patients by alerting physicians to patients’ risk and severity of infection and providing suggestions for managing care.
5. A team of researchers found USA300 MRSA strains can liger in households for 2.3 to 8.3 years, spreading among inhabitants, and have a one in a million chance of randomly genetically changing.
6. Two new influenza strains have caused infections in China and Taiwan, but researchers from The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., have discovered the strains do not yet easily infect humans.
7. According to a recent report, survival rates for high-risk surgical procedures can vary significantly from hospital to hospital by as much as 19 percent.
8. One study revealed that, on average, roughly one in every 200 patients undergoing a prostate biopsy are misdiagnosed due to their biopsy specimens being switched with or contaminated by those of another patient.
9. Boston-based Massachusetts General Hospital researchers have found each one-star increase in a hospital’s Facebook rating is associated with a greater than five-fold increase in the likelihood the hospital would have a low, rather than high, readmission rate.
