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2019 UVA Anesthesiology Point-of-Care (PoCUS) Course is organized by University of Virginia (UVA) and will be held from Jan 23 - 24, 2019 at The Village at Breckenridge, Breckenridge, Colorado, United States of America.

Immediate access to opioid agonist treatment (OAT) for patients presenting with opioid use disorder may provide greater health benefits at less cost than observed standard of care, according to a study published online Nov. 21 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Emanuel Krebs, from St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues sought to determine the cost-effectiveness of OAT versus observed standard of care for patients presenting with opioid use disorder. Population-level administrative databases capturing treatment and criminal justice records for California were linked (2006 to 2010). Immediate access to OAT for all treatment recipients was found by the researchers to cost less (by $78,257), with patients accumulating more quality-adjusted life-years (by 0.42) versus the observed standard of care. Imagining a hypothetical scenario where all Californians starting treatment of opioid use disorder in 2014 had immediate access to OAT, the team found that total lifetime savings for this cohort could be as high as $3.8 billion.

Internal medicine patients are frequently prescribed potentially inappropriate medications (PIMs), but screening tools can detect clinically relevant PIMs, according to a study published online Oct. 8 in the Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics. Anne-Laure Blanc, Pharm.D., Ph.D., from Geneva University Hospitals in Switzerland, and colleagues compared two PIM-screening tools -- STOPP/START and PIM-Check -- in a general internal medicine ward. They also analyzed a random sample of 50 patients hospitalized in 2013, whose readmission within 30 days of discharge had been potentially preventable, and 50 sex-and age-matched patients who were not readmitted. The researchers found that across the whole ward population, PIM-Check and STOPP/START detected 1,348 and 537 PIMs, respectively, which was the equivalent of 13.5 and 5.4 PIMs per patient. PIM-Check had a substantially shorter screening time versus STOPP/START (four versus 10 minutes). Of the PIMs detected using PIM-Check and STOPP/START, the clinical pharmacist found 45 percent and 42 percent, respectively, to be clinically relevant to individual patients' cases. There were no significant differences in the rates of detected and clinically relevant PIMs between readmitted and nonreadmitted patients.