hospital quality

(Left to right) NYU medical students Brian Chao, Michael Lui, Hye Min Choi, and Varun Vijay take the team approach to learning about the anatomy of cells, and how disease can disrupt them. Analyzing big data sets is now a routine part of their studies, to

Medical Students Crunch Big Data To Spot Health Trends

6:13pm October 30, 2015

by Julie Rovner

It's not enough anymore to learn how to size up the symptoms of a particular patient, say specialists in bioinformatics. Modern doctors need to learn to see patterns in huge data sets, too.

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What To Do With California's Mentally Ill Defendants?

4:29pm October 21, 2015

by Scott Shafer

Jail is too dangerous for many defendants found incompetent to stand trial because of illnesses like schizophrenia, judges say. But psychiatric hospitals are now overcrowded and violent, too.

University Medical Center New Orleans on Aug. 1, when the $1 billion facility welcomed its first patients.

Katrina Shut Down Charity Hospital But Led To More Primary Care

2:44pm August 26, 2015

by Patti Neighmond

More than 70 percent of New Orleans residents say some progress has been made in the availability of medical services since the storm. Still, most say care for the poor continues to lag.

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A Yale University study analyzed the experience of 60 million Americans covered by traditional Medicare between 1999 and 2013, and found "jaw-dropping improvements in almost every area," the lead author says.

Happy 50th Birthday, Medicare. Your Patients Are Getting Healthier

8:49am July 30, 2015

by Richard Harris

The past 15 years have seen a drop in deaths and hospitalizations among Medicare patients — people 65 and older. Teasing out why is tricky, but it seems a good trend for the 50-year-old program.

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In order to improve the quality of healthcare and reduce its costs, researchers need to know what works and what doesn't. But hospitals and doctors have lots of reasons for keeping any data that's collected private.

Who Keeps Track If Your Surgery Goes Well Or Fails?

4:37pm May 04, 2015

by Richard Harris

The outcomes of many medical procedures and treatments done in hospitals nationwide aren't tracked or even measured, says a surgeon who thinks that's bad. Understanding outcomes, he says, saves lives.

A particularly nasty family of gut bacteria with the nickname CRE is resistant even to carbapenems, a family of last-resort antibiotics.

Why California's Superbug Outbreak Isn't As Scary As It Seems

5:49pm February 20, 2015

by Jon Hamilton

The outbreak of drug-thwarting bacteria that contributed to the deaths of two patients at a UCLA hospital isn't likely to spread further, doctors say. Still, drug resistance is trouble nationwide.