Silencing Many Hospital Alarms Leads To Better Health Care : Shots - Health News. Hide captionAmanda Gerety, a staff nurse at Boston Medical Center, checks monitors that track patients' vital signs. Fewer beeps means crisis warnings are easier to hear, she says. Richard Knox/NPR Go into almost any hospital these days and you'll hear a constant stream of beeps and boops. To most people it sounds like medical Muzak. But to doctors and nurses, it's not just sonic wallpaper. Those incessant beeps contain important coded messages. "The three-burst is a crisis alarm," systems engineer James Piepenbrink of Boston Medical Center explains on a tour of 7 North, the hospital's cardiac care unit. "Two tones is a warning," he says. Alarms are good and necessary things in hospital care, except when there are so many of them that caregivers can't keep track of the ones that signal a crisis that requires immediate attention. In the case of Boston Medical Center, an analysis found that 7 North was experiencing 12,000 alarms a day, on average.
That can be dangerous. This is why controlling health-care costs is almost impossible. When Parasites Catch Viruses. Trichomona Vaginalis trophozoite. Image courtesy of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When humans have parasites, the organisms live in our bodies, co-opt our resources, and cause disease. However, it turns out that parasites themselves can have their own co-habitants. Researchers from Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and SUNY Upstate Medical University have found that the pathogenicity of the sexually transmitted protozoan parasite Trichomonas vaginalis—the cause of trichomoniasis—is fueled by a viral invader. Trichomoniasis infections are more common than all bacterial STDs combined. Annually, trichomoniasis affects nearly 250 million people, typically as vaginitis in women and urethritis in men. “This is only one of two incidences that we know of for which the pathogenicity of a protozoan virus has been characterized,” said Max Nibert, Harvard Medical School professor of microbiology and immunology and co-author of the paper.
Photo of the Day: Success In Infant Health Care. Melinda French Gates and Gary Darmstadt, director of the Family Health program, visit the Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) Unit at Bwaila Hospital in Lilongwe, Malawi. The success of the KMC program, which promotes infant health through skin-to-skin contact with mothers, has helped propel its expansion to 12 hospitals and five health clinics in Malawi. (Lilongwe, Malawi, 2010) TEDMED Tuesday: Larry Brilliant & Peggy Hamburg, Commissioner of the FDA | Nurture by Steelcase – Healthcare Furniture. Leveraging Advanced Data Collection and Analysis to Reduce Client Risks. Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks.