Notes from Dr. RW

Having trouble getting along with your ER colleagues? Talk to each other! That and other tips from Today’s Hospitalist.

Two recent articles form The Hospitalist offer some tips.

Review in Hospital Physician.

---and now that’s evidence based. From JAMA : Conclusions In this registry, nonelectrophysiologists implanted 29% of ICDs. Overall, implan...

I love it when low technology offers powerful diagnostic tools. Thomas E. Brittingham, M.D., one of Vanderbilt’s great teachers, would tell...

Read this . Then imagine how your world as a hospitalist would change if we had an adult pneumococcal vaccine that actually worked.

If it’s a drug or a surgical procedure insist on a randomized clinical trial. If it’s a system of care (e.g. rapid response teams) go with ...

DB was recently blogging from the ACP national meeting. His post on the keynote , about comparative effectiveness research (CER), opens wit...

Over the last couple of days I’ve been trying to cut through the hype about swine flu. It’s been difficult because media reports are coming ...

---as noted in this recent paper . Another study a couple of years ago found the same thing, and I cited it here . Authors of the recent pa...

Accumulating evidence suggests it’s not necessary. Emergency Medicine professor Richard Bukata went on a rant about it in a recent issue of...

Recently I’ve posted a couple of anecdotal reports of documentation and coding fraud driven by electronic medical record documentation too...

It’s more often an acute disease, and more often due to S. aureus . Via Archives of Internal Medicine .

This study adds to our understanding: Of 1015 patients enrolled, 181 patients (17.8%) had clinically significant bacteremia, including 77 pa...

ACP Advocate Blog author Bob Doherty is reporting from ACP convention headquarters in Philadelphia. He’s pumped up about the annual meeting...

---is underappreciated in asthma patients. Review here . From the abstract: Because many patients with ABPA may be minimally symptomatic o...

---worked better than doubling the dose of the initial drug in this meta-analysis : Blood pressure reduction from combining drugs from these...

In a recent post Bob Wachter discusses the growing backlash against the measurement and public reporting of performance metrics. Research r...

---improves macrovascular outcomes in DM 2, NNT 16.1 according to this study . Given that so many treatments are macrovascular neutral or e...

Not very, according to this study . Wikipedia has a more narrow scope, is less complete, and has more errors of omission than the comparator...