Health care-associated infections (HAI) occur in a variety of settings and are caused by a variety of pathogens. They occur in ambulatory, institutional, hospital, and home-based settings. Four primary categories of HAIs exist, most of which are seen in acute care settings: surgical site infections,... Read more →

Residency training in the United States has historically been a period of abusive hours and intense training. Until recently, there was no limit to the number of hours per week a resident could work. In fact, that has something to do with why they’re called “residents” in the first place: they... Read more →

Dr. David Blumenthal is the newly appointed National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. You may have seen his name as the director of the Institute for Health Policy at the Massachusetts General Hospital (also known as “Mass General”) and Partners Healthcare System which is part... Read more →

More than 5 years ago in his state of the union address, President George W. Bush announced a goal that all Americans have electronic health records within 10 years. Since then, momentum has been building towards that target, but we still have a long way to go. A recent special article published online... Read more →

Every year around this time there’s a news article about people dying from carbon monoxide poisoning, either from a faulty furnace or from sitting in a running vehicle with poor ventilation. A colorless, odorless, tasteless gas, carbon monoxide can build up to dangerous levels insidiously. Carbon monoxide... Read more →

Patients and their families often do not want to be hospitalized over a weekend; Hospital staff does not want to keep patients over a weekend. But, could the push out the hospital door have serious implications for patient morbidity and mortality? Several studies have shown that the timing of hospital... Read more →

Has this scenario ever happened to either you or somebody you know? You get a raving endorsement from a friend or family member about the doctor they saw, and how they’re the best thing ever, and how you absolutely MUST go see them immediately? How many times has somebody actually gone to see a... Read more →

I’ve been thinking about sleeping a lot lately. Not in the sense of curling up under the blankets for hours on end, but in the sense of thinking about the topic of sleeping. As the program director of an internal medicine residency program, one of my jobs is to make sure that my residents are rested... Read more →

On December 2nd, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report suggesting that resident physicians have further limits on work hours than those enacted in 2003 by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). While the number of hours per week would remain at the ACGME maximum... Read more →

Personal health records or PHRs are becoming more and more popular these days as health information technology capabilities become more wide-spread. Look at Google Health as one example. The federal government has picked Google Health as one of four components of a Medicare pilot program in Arizona.... Read more →

The time was June 2000. Scientists with the Celera Genomics Corporation, in conjunction with the international Human Genome Project, announced that they had successfully derived the entire sequence of the human genome. Furthermore, they noted that humans share 99.9% of their genetic code with one another.... Read more →