Constant readers: I am headed to the ICAAC/IDSA meeting. (For those not into medical acronyms, that's the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, which is the biggest infectious-disease conference of the year that isn't exclusively about HIV, and which this year is combined with the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the second biggest. Yes, it's an infectious-disease geekgasm.)
Posting is likely to be erratic: I expect there to be a ton of MRSA news, but no time to write about it. However, I'll be throwing things up here as I can, and will also be filing flu news to CIDRAP — though, since CIDRAP doesn't publish on weekends, don't expect anything there til Monday or Tuesday.
See you on the far side.
Showing posts with label lame excuses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lame excuses. Show all posts
24 October 2008
03 September 2008
We pause in our goggle-eyed convention watching to bring you...
[I'm sorry, faithful readers. It's the most compelling election of my voting lifetime. I'm riveted. Also, I spent hours in the ER Sunday getting stitched up from a bike crash. A very clean ER ... I hope.]
... an intriguing paper on controlling antibiotic prescribing within health care institutions.
Limiting inappropriate use of antibiotics is one of the central goals of the movement to control MRSA. Often, that's interpreted as getting primary-care docs and pediatricians to resist pressure from consumers, especially parents with busy lives who need to limit their sick child's illness so they can get back to work (or put the child back in day care) and stubbornly insist that antibiotics will help even when the illness is viral. But it's just as important, possibly more important, to control inappropriate use in hospitals, where sick patients with depleted immune systems who are getting lots of drugs provide a fertile breeding ground for resistant strains.
So how to do that? If possible, you want the intervention to be systematized, not exceptional; you want it to be a routine occurrence, so clinicians don't feel singled out for their prescribing choices, and you want it to be not face-to-face, so that the encounter remains about the patient and the drug, not about a clash of personalities.
A team at Johns Hopkins' children's hospital seems to have hit it whang in the gold. In the Sept. 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Allison Agwu, Christoph Lehmann and colleagues describe a Web-based system that they instituted that significantly reduced inappropriate dosing and saved more than $370,000 in a year while making clinicians and pharmacists happier than they were with the previous system (which involved pagers and was face-to-face).
By chance, the Wall Street Journal ran a story this morning looking at such intervention programs, though not the Hopkins one — a story I missed because, in my normal reading time, I was interviewing Agwu and Lehmann. (H/t Joanne Kenen for alerting me to it though.)
... an intriguing paper on controlling antibiotic prescribing within health care institutions.
Limiting inappropriate use of antibiotics is one of the central goals of the movement to control MRSA. Often, that's interpreted as getting primary-care docs and pediatricians to resist pressure from consumers, especially parents with busy lives who need to limit their sick child's illness so they can get back to work (or put the child back in day care) and stubbornly insist that antibiotics will help even when the illness is viral. But it's just as important, possibly more important, to control inappropriate use in hospitals, where sick patients with depleted immune systems who are getting lots of drugs provide a fertile breeding ground for resistant strains.
So how to do that? If possible, you want the intervention to be systematized, not exceptional; you want it to be a routine occurrence, so clinicians don't feel singled out for their prescribing choices, and you want it to be not face-to-face, so that the encounter remains about the patient and the drug, not about a clash of personalities.
A team at Johns Hopkins' children's hospital seems to have hit it whang in the gold. In the Sept. 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Allison Agwu, Christoph Lehmann and colleagues describe a Web-based system that they instituted that significantly reduced inappropriate dosing and saved more than $370,000 in a year while making clinicians and pharmacists happier than they were with the previous system (which involved pagers and was face-to-face).
By chance, the Wall Street Journal ran a story this morning looking at such intervention programs, though not the Hopkins one — a story I missed because, in my normal reading time, I was interviewing Agwu and Lehmann. (H/t Joanne Kenen for alerting me to it though.)
08 November 2007
Rumors of the blog's death are only slightly exaggerated
Yes, I vanished. Yes, I had a good reason: For the past few months, I've been neck-deep and sinking into a massive project for the infectious-disease website CIDRAP News, examining the search for a vaccine against pandemic influenza. Very short version of the many conclusions: Let's hope the pandemic takes a long time to arrive, because we are nowhere near ready, and the obstacles are both formidable and largely of our own making.
The entire project ran to seven installments. Read the first installment here. At the bottom, you'll find links to the other installments, and to the more-than-100 cite bibliography. The series has been well-received in the flu-blog world:
Meanwhile, while I was away, there was a ton of news on the MRSA front. We'll be taking a look at some recent developments in the next few days.
The entire project ran to seven installments. Read the first installment here. At the bottom, you'll find links to the other installments, and to the more-than-100 cite bibliography. The series has been well-received in the flu-blog world:
- "This is clearly one of the most important contributions CIDRAP has made to the H5N1 issue (and that is saying a lot)." H5N1
- "Ms. McKenna (author of Beating Back The Devil) proves, once again, why she is one of the best science writers in the business." Avian Flu Diary
- "Another excellent offering from Maryn McKenna." A Journey Through the World of Pandemic Influenza
Meanwhile, while I was away, there was a ton of news on the MRSA front. We'll be taking a look at some recent developments in the next few days.
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