Patients with sepsis, severe sepsis and/or septic shock are at increased risk of death and organ dysfunction.  While morbidity and mortality of patients with severe traumatic injury, acute myocardial infarction or stroke have been significantly reduced during recent years by the implementation of well-coordinated...

Postoperative cardiovascular event including myocardial infarction or heart failure is a major cause of morbidity after non-cardiac surgery. Preoperative evaluation including estimation of the probability of perioperative cardiac event and application of non-invasive testing or beta-blocker has been developed, but...

Hemodialysis and related treatments for those with failing kidneys all involve blood flow through a circuit outside the body. This extracorporeal circuit - the dialysis machine and its connections from and back to the body - is a non-physiological, pro-coagulant environment.  To counter the tendency for patients'...

The process of patient sample testing, whether performed in the clinical laboratory or at the point of care, is the sum of three distinct phases. The first is the preanalytical phase, which includes test selection as well as sample collection and handling.  The second is the analytical or measuring phase that...

Over the years, as clinicians have learned how to utilize it, permissive hypercapnia has been finding a place in healthcare. However, it is important to bear in mind that numbers do not tell the entire story. It is imperative to understand the entire clinical picture before you act. For example, an acidic pH of 7.21...

Clinical laboratory measurement of serum/plasma creatinine concentration has been used to assess patient kidney function for well over 50 years.  With the incorporation of creatinine analyses to blood gas and other point-of-care platforms the test is now available outside the laboratory, at the bedside and in the...

PURPOSE – The purpose of this article is to discuss lean as a learning system in a hospital ward. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH – Discusses lean as a learning system in a hospital ward. FINDINGS – The Toyota veterans are fond of saying, lean is about “making people before making parts” or, in the wards’ context,...

The following is a copy of an article from Evidence-Based Practice, 2007; 10(12):1-2. Venous thromboembolism refers to a spectrum of disease that includes both pulmonary embolus and deep-venous thrombosis (DVT). More than 250,000 people in the United States are diagnosed annually with venous thromboembolic disease;...

CONTEXT: Sensitive D-dimer assays have been developed to exclude the diagnosis of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and have exhibited great success when used in conjunction with a diagnostic algorithm, including pretest probability scoring and a compression ultrasound (CUS). Improving specificity of D-dimer assays would...

Clinical laboratory measurement of serum/plasma creatinine concentration has been used to assess patient kidney function for well over 50 years. With incorporation of creatinine analyses to blood gas and other point-of-care platforms the test is now available outside the laboratory, at the bedside and in the clinic.  ...