Despite improvements in their performance over the past decade, electronic health records (EHRs) commonly used in hospitals nationwide fail to detect up to one in three potentially harmful drug interactions and other medication errors, according to scientists at University of Utah Health, Harvard University, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. In tests using simulated medical records, the researchers found ...

New sterilizer’s unique features address longstanding process challenges Sterilucent, Inc. (Minneapolis, MN), announces that the company has received regulatory clearance to market the Sterilucent™ HC 80TT Vaporized Hydrogen Peroxide Sterilizer with Cycle Guardian™ technology in the United States. Cycle Guardian technology includes: Advanced and continuous critical parameter monitoring capability, which enables advanced dynamic sterilant delivery, confirms that the minimum required concentration of the ...

The diffusion of a culture of openness in hospitals is associated with lower hospital mortality, according to a study conducted among 137 acute trusts in England by Veronica Toffolutti (Bocconi University and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) and David Stuckler (Bocconi University) published in Health Affairs. Hospital openness, defined as “an environment in which staff freely speak up if ...

Four years after their publication by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), voluntary guidelines designed to increase the safety of e-health records have yet to be implemented fully, according to a survey led by a researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). Findings appeared recently in the Journal of the ...