Rheumatology

Use of the Diabetes Medication Choice cards can help patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) and their primary care physicians by increasing patients’ involvement in making decisions about DM medications.

When patients present to primary care physicians with acute low back pain (LBP), a serious causative underlying pathology-cancer, fracture, or infection-is seldom identified. Some recommended “red flag” screening questions have high false-positive rates, casting doubt on the value of looking for bigger trouble when none is obvious.

Hip fractures were almost twice as common in women as in men during the study period. The age-adjusted incidence of hip fracture increased between 1986 and 1995 (9% for women, 16.4% for men) but then decreased from 1995 to 2005 (24.5% for women, 19.2% for men).

Nonadherence to the treatment regimen is a major problem that affects about one-third of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) who use disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs).

A Pilates training program was effective in improving arm-trunk posture, strength, flexibility, and biomechanical patterns during a functional shoulder flexion task in a study conducted by Canadian researchers. Emery and colleagues1 assessed 19 study participants; 10 persons in the experimental group entered a Pilates training program. The evaluation consisted of trials of seated posture, abdominal strength, shoulder range of motion, and maximal shoulder flexion; the investigators recorded neck, shoulder, and trunk kinematics and the activity of 16 muscles.

HITECH says covered entities must be able to monitor and record every time that patient data is accessed, enabling the entity to comply with the new notification requirements should unauthorized access occur. Will the new rules end up restricting the efficient exchange of data that is crucial to providing high-quality healthcare?

As EHRs are widely adopted and the quantity of information about a patient expands dramatically, does provider liability increase even if the quality of care is vastly improved?

Large organizations with mobile workers, such as hospitals, face diminished productivity when communication is inefficient and its employees are unable to locate their coworkers in a timely manner.

Bravo. The government finally has its healthcare IT priorities straight. Unfortunately, it won't be able to achieve them.

For those interested in health information technology, there is now an excellent, new, powerful website about this topic called the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. In their most recent report, "Can Cleveland Clinic Be a Model for Digital Medicine?" they discuss how this hospital system has failed to recoup their $100 million investment to date.

Some pundits have written that health insurance mandates are well beyond the constitutional authority of the federal government to tax, spend, and regulate interstate commerce. Others have picked up on these arguments and applied them to the EHR-implementation incentives under the HITECH Act as well. The bottom line is that these arguments fail, for four reasons.

There has been much discussion about the HITECH Act and the effects it will have on healthcare in this country. The health IT industry and the federal government claim that EHR use will lead to a decrease in costs and an overall improvement in patient care. Skeptics like me disagree with these claims and feel that the push to adopt complex EHRs will be a bad deal for physicians.

Lately, I've been thinking about how fast everything moves these days. This is true in technology, medicine, business, and other important areas of our lives. Keeping up with changes in healthcare is a real challenge; just reading monthly print medical journals won't cut it anymore in the digital age. Now, practically every day I find myself looking something up on Wikipedia.

Fusobacterium necrophorum may cause up to 10 percent of sore throats in those 15-24 years of age and is associated with Lemierre syndrome, a rare but life-threatening complication.

As I wrote in a previous blog post, the approaching fire storm over the patient-centered medical home model reminds me of the destructive powers seen before in HMOs.

Is rheumatology not as hip as other medical specialties? Is the average rheumatologist older and resistant to new technology?

Collaboration is important in healthcare, as evidenced by the growing number of "learning communities" and grassroots efforts that are bringing people and organizations together to work on the issue of eliminating disparities in health and healthcare.

As of December 2000, 21 of 30 randomized, placebo-controlled trials had been completed and the risk of a cardiovascular thromboembolic adverse event or death was greater among subjects assigned to the rofecoxib group, raising concerns from a safety standpoint.

A national health information technology infrastructure (NHITI) is not only necessary, but it is cardinal to improving delivery and reducing costs of healthcare in the United States.

The powerful vendor-lobbying group, HIMSS, has been extremely successful over the last 8 years lobbying our elected political leaders about HIT.

I have been following with interest all the discussions about the new Medical Home (aka, the Patient Centered Medical Home) concept. This is our silver bullet that will improve patient access, raise quality levels, increase overall satisfaction and save billions of healthcare dollars - all at the same time!

The pundits are going to have their field day with this one. "The danger [with this Bill] is that as costs continue to rise and coverage becomes less comprehensive, people will conclude that we've tried health reform and it didn't work. But the real problem will be that we didn't really try it.

Products endorsed by the Arthritis Foundation’s Ease-of-Use Commendation Program are universally accessible, which means that the products don’t have to be specially designed for people with a disability, but they should be designed in way that all consumers can use them.

The results from a study that evaluated the side effects of smoking in people with systemic lupus erthematosus found they clearly experienced skin damage and rashes.

The Institute of Medicine released its "To Err is Human" report in 2000. Now that we're nearing the end of 2009, safety experts are examining the extent to which the IOM's recommendations have been implemented.

We rank 19th among industrialized countries in preventable deaths in such conditions as diabetes, epilepsy, stroke, influenza, ulcers, pneumonia, infant mortality, and appendicitis.

Obesity is a modifiable risk factor for knee osteoarthritis (OA). Weight loss may reduce the risk of knee OA, and increased levels of physical activity may result in improvements in disability-related outcomes. However, intensity of physical activity is not as important in weight loss as total energy expended.

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) may lead to increased pulmonary vascular resistance, compromised vasoreactivity, right heart failure, and death. PAH, a subset of pulmonary hypertension (PH), classically is associated with systemic sclerosis but also occurs with other rheumatologic conditions. Early diagnostic strategies are essential. The symptoms of PAH often are nonspecific; the most common presenting symptom is dyspnea.