Tag Archives: Patient

ONC’s Proposed Rule is a Breakthrough in Patient Empowerment

By ADRIAN GROPPER Imagine solving wicked problems of patient matching, consent, and a patient-centered longitudinal health record while also enabling a world of new healthcare services for patients and physicians to use. The long-awaited Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on information blocking from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) promises nothing less.… Read More »

Virtual video visits may improve patient convenience without sacrificing quality of care

A team of researchers at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reports in the American Journal of Managed Care that virtual video visits, one form of telehealth visit used at the hospital, can successfully replace office visits for many patients without compromising the quality of care and communication. Virtual video visits are personal video chats between a health… Read More »

How Montreal surgeons took apart and pieced back together the skull of a young hydrocephalus patient

On Nov. 5, a pediatric team led by Dr. Alexander Weil and Dr. Daniel Borsuk performed a 12-hour operation on a two-year-old girl with hydrocephalus at Montreal’s CHU Sainte-Justine hospital. They cut into the child’s scalp from ear to ear, removed her skull in pieces, drained nearly two litres of fluid from her brain and… Read More »

A patient coughed up this huge blood clot that perfectly replicates the airways of his lung

A man undergoing treatment for heart failure coughed up an enormous, intact blood clot that formed a perfect cast of the air passageways of his lung. The completeness of the clot, once unfolded onto blue medical cloth, astounded doctors; they could trace the three branches of the upper lobe of the lung, the two branches… Read More »

Even hospitals with high patient survival rates still struggle with readmissions

Cardiology patients have better survival rates at hospitals atop the U.S. News and World Report rankings, but the risk of readmission is more or less the same — and with 30-day readmissions tied to reimbursement, that could pose an issue for providers at all points on the spectrum. The top 50 hospitals showed consistently low… Read More »