CardioExchange Archive

February 5th, 2015

The ABIM’s Maintenance of Certification Program: What’s Next?

John Ryan, MD

John Ryan reacts to the new American Board of Internal Medicine announcement about its MoC program.

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April 28th, 2014

Selections from Richard Lehman’s Literature Review: April 28th

Richard Lehman, BM, BCh, MRCGP

This week’s topics include BP targets during septic shock, reducing time-to-needle times in acute ischemic stroke, and an increase in fat and calorie consumption in U.S. statin users.

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January 24th, 2013

Hospital Readmissions May Be Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Anita Vashi, MD, MPH

Do you know when your patients end up back in the ED but are not rehospitalized?

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August 7th, 2012

Reducing MI Readmissions: Time to Turn Objectives into Practice

Betsy Bradley, Ph.D.

A survey finds that while most hospitals have a stated objective to reduce AMI readmissions, adoption of actual strategies to achieve that goal is another matter.

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January 3rd, 2012

Measuring In-Hospital Mortality Favors Hospitals with Short Stays

Larry Husten, PHD

As a measure of performance and quality, in-hospital mortality systematically favors hospitals with shorter overall length of stay (LOS) times, according to a new study published in Annals of Internal Medicine. This finding may have important implications for quality improvement initiatives that use mortality as a performance measure. Elizabeth Drye and colleagues (including senior author Harlan Krumholz, editor-in-chief […]

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December 8th, 2011

How Randomness Affects Quality of Care

John E Brush, MD

Each month I meet with administrators at my hospital to review the quality of our cardiology program. My administrators don’t want excuses. They aim for perfection. But a discussion at our last meeting about door-to-balloon times for STEMI patients changed their minds.

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March 14th, 2011

The Common Thread Among Top-Performing Hospitals

Leslie Curry, PhD, MPH

A qualitative study just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine outlines some important distinctions between hospitals that have the lowest AMI mortality rates in the U.S and those that have the highest. The key factor? A supportive organizational culture. Here, study investigator Leslie Curry, PhD, MPH walks us through what that means and how […]

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January 5th, 2011

Do Sleep-Deprived Invasive Cardiologists Cause Complications?

Richard A. Lange, MD, MBA

In an NEJM perspective, the former president of the Sleep Research Society reports an 83% increase in the risk of surgical complications in patients undergoing elective daytime surgery performed by attending surgeons who had a <6-hour opportunity for sleep between procedures during a previous on-call night.  He argues that physicians who have been awake for […]

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