June 25th, 2011
Podcast 124: Getting more accuracy into blood pressure measurements
Patients’ systolic pressures vary by about 10%, regardless of whether they are measured at home or under the duress of a visit to the doctor. That variation is troubling when deciding whether to put a patient on an antihypertensive regimen: how reliable are the measurements that will form the basis of your decision? How do […]
November 5th, 2010
Podcast 107: Hospital falls and how to reduce them
Our conversation is with Dr. Patricia Dykes of Boston’s Partners HealthCare. She’s first author on a paper published in JAMA earlier this week. In her study of fall prevention in hospitals, she and her team randomized eight medical units in four Boston-area hospitals either to their usual standards of fall prevention or to use of […]
May 7th, 2010
Podcast 86: Prompt follow-up after discharge for heart failure reduces early-readmission rates.
Why wouldn’t you want your hospital to lower its rate of early readmissions for heart failure by 15%? We talk with Dr. Adrian Hernandez about his examination of Medicare data from over 200 hospitals, how the hospitals vary widely in the rates at which their patients are followed up within a week of discharge for […]
April 9th, 2010
Podcast 82: Checklists save lives — lots of lives. Becoming a clinical automaton.
Repetitive tasks, like making sure to wash your hands after seeing each patient, may seem like drudgery, but they save patients’ lives. This week we talk with Prof. Elizabeth Robb and Sir Brian Jarman about their success at chopping hospital mortality rates with simple checklists. Sir Brian has offered to monitor your hospital’s stats for free. […]
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