Arch Intern Med
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The American Pain Society (APS) set out to revise and expand its 1995 Quality Improvement Guidelines for the Treatment of Acute Pain and Cancer Pain and to facilitate improvements in the quality of pain management in all care settings. ⋯ Efforts to improve the quality of pain management must move beyond assessment and communication of pain to implementation and evaluation of improvements in pain treatment that are timely, safe, evidence based, and multimodal.
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While previous studies have demonstrated the increased mortality risk associated with delirium, little is known about the mortality time course. The objective of this study is to estimate the fraction of a year of life lost associated with delirium at 1-year follow-up. ⋯ Patients who experienced delirium during hospitalization had a 62% increased risk of mortality and lost an average of 13% of a year of life compared with patients without delirium. Although delirium is an acute condition, it is associated with multiple long-term sequelae that extend beyond the hospital setting, including premature mortality.
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The role of inflammation in patients with coronary artery disease is emerging. We sought to assess the profile and outcomes of patients with a clinical syndrome of severe systemic inflammation that led to a diagnosis of suspected sepsis in the setting of acute myocardial infarction complicated by cardiogenic shock (CS). ⋯ Almost one fifth of patients with acute myocardial infarction complicated by CS showed clinical signs of severe systemic inflammation, and those who were culture-positive for sepsis had twice the risk of death. The observation of lower SVR at the onset of shock in patients who subsequently had culture-positive systemic inflammation suggests that inappropriate vasodilation may play an important role in the pathogenesis and persistence of shock and in the risk of infection.
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Multicenter Study Comparative Study
Adherence to heart failure quality-of-care indicators in US hospitals: analysis of the ADHERE Registry.
Quality-of-care indicators have been developed for patients hospitalized with heart failure. However, little is known about current rates of conformity with these indicators or their variability across hospitals. ⋯ Among hospitals providing care for patients with heart failure, there is significant individual variability in conformity to quality-of-care indicators and clinical outcomes and a substantial gap in overall performance. Establishing educational initiatives and quality improvement systems to reduce this variability and eliminate this gap would be expected to substantially improve the care of these patients.