Patient Safety & Outcomes

The CDC released a new toolkit for payers that empowers them to provide feedback to providers on outpatient antibiotic prescriptions and improve use. 

The federal government can play an influential role in reducing racial disparities in maternal health outcomes, according to a Sept. 15 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.  

Anchorage-based Providence Alaska Medical Center, the state's largest hospital, has activated crisis standards of care for the hospital, which is facing a shortage of staff and other resources amid the latest COVID-19 surge.

Hospitals across the U.S., particularly in the South, are running low on intensive care unit beds as the delta variant drives COVID-19 surges, The New York Times reported.

Relative to vaccinated people, those who are unvaccinated and infected with COVID-19 face a 10 times higher risk of hospitalization and are 11 times more likely to die from the disease, the CDC's Sept. 10 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report…

Health officials in New Mexico are investigating the state's first suspected case of fatal poisoning from ivermectin after a person self-administered the drug, USA Today reported Sept. 10. 

Many hospitals in the South are short on staff members trained to provide extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, a last-resort therapy for severely ill COVID-19 patients, Kaiser Health News reported Sept. 10.

Intermountain Healthcare said it is joining other U.S. hospitals and health systems that have delayed nonemergency surgeries amid a COVID-19 surge fueled by the highly transmissible delta variant.

More Delta Air Lines workers have started the COVID-19 vaccination process after the company announced it would increase health insurance costs for its unvaccinated employees.

The median age of fully vaccinated people who developed a severe breakthrough COVID-19 infection from March through June was 80, a study published Sept. 7 in The Lancet Infectious Diseases found.