Hospital Medicine News

The pandemic has disrupted HIV care, including routine testing. By making phlebotomy part of the COVID-19 testing process, an ED at the University of Chicago Medicine kept up its HIV screening volumes during the pandemic, data show.

Messenger RNA vaccines by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were 94% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 among health care workers after two doses and more than 80% effective after one, researchers reported in MMWR.

Contrary to expectations, there was a significant decline in hospitalizations for abusive head trauma among children aged younger than 5 years during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers reported in Pediatrics.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted CMS to expand the availability of hospital at home programs, which offer patients acute care in a comfortable setting.

Researchers reported that patients who experienced at least one opioid-induced respiratory depression event on a hospital’s general care floor spent about 6 days in the hospital and had more than $21,000 in related costs.

Children hospitalized for asthma exacerbations and treated with ibuprofen spend less time in the hospital than those treated with acetaminophen, data presented at the virtual Pediatric Academic Societies Annual Meeting showed.

The quality of information about patients who were transferred from one hospital to another was often “suboptimal” and affected patient care, according to researchers.

A hospital intervention designed to raise awareness of naloxone and remove prescribing barriers was associated with a 584% increase in prescriptions among patients at high risk for an opioid overdose, according to recent research.

The addition of an infectious diseases specialist to the critical care team at a New York hospital led to a decrease in the use of commonly prescribed broad-spectrum antibiotics without negatively impacting patient care, according to a study.

A New York hospital reported an increased incidence and relative risk for postpartum depression in new mothers with COVID-19 who were separated from their newborns, a retrospective cohort study showed.