Internal medicine journal
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Internal medicine journal · Oct 2020
Burden of infective endocarditis in an Australian cohort of people who inject drugs.
Infective endocarditis (IE) results in substantial morbidity and mortality in people who inject drugs (PWID). ⋯ IE causes a considerable burden of disease in PWID, with significant healthcare utilisation and cost. Surgery and death are not infrequent complications. In addition to ensuring completion of antimicrobial therapy, strategies such as opioid maintenance programmes may be useful in improving health outcomes for PWID.
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Internal medicine journal · Oct 2020
Quality of care in inflammatory bowel disease: actual health service experiences fall short of the standards.
Quality of care in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has received much attention internationally; however, the available surveys focus on health professionals rather than patients. ⋯ These data show discordance between expectations of patients and national standards with current levels of service provision, which fail to deliver equitable and comprehensive IBD care.
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Internal medicine journal · Oct 2020
Clinical decision support in a hospital electronic prescribing system informed by local data: experience at a tertiary New Zealand centre.
An electronic prescribing and administration (ePA) system has been progressively rolled out to Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB, Christchurch, New Zealand) public hospitals since 2014, and is currently used for around 1300 tertiary beds. ePA data can be used to monitor user behaviour, and to evaluate and inform the local customisation of clinical decision support (CDS) tools within the ePA system. ⋯ Local data extracts from ePA systems can inform iterative configuration of the software and monitor user behaviour.
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Internal medicine journal · Oct 2020
Patient factors affecting the proper completion of a Goals-Of-Care form in a general medicine hospital admission.
The goals-of-care (GOC) form is a resuscitation planning tool used to document informed decisions tailored for individual patients admitted to hospital. Proper and timely completion of the GOC form is essential for its effective utility. ⋯ The proper GOC form completion rates were suboptimal in general medicine admissions, particularly in younger patients with fewer comorbidities. Additional effort is needed to improve GOC completion in these patients and those whose primary spoken language is not English.