Hospital Medicine News

Patients diagnosed with COVID-19 who have negative pharyngeal tests and are subsequently released from the hospital may not be virus free, according to a research report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that found some patients still tested positive for the virus in sputum and feces testing.

As the COVID-19 pandemic escalates in the United States, concerns have grown about the strain that the inevitable increase in patients will cause to the nation’s health care system.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread across the United States, increasing numbers of practices and hospitals are turning to telehealth to safely care for patients.

Medicaid expansion may have led to reductions in opioid-related hospitalizations between 2005 and 2017, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Playing slow-tempo music may be an acceptable and feasible strategy for reducing delirium among patients staying in the ICU, according to research published in the American Journal of Critical Care.

Adults with uncomplicated acute appendicitis who were treated with antibiotics and did not need surgery at a later date were as satisfied with their treatment experience as those who went through surgery, according to a secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial that appeared in JAMA Surgery.

Patients with Parkinson’s disease experienced improved quality of life and reduced symptoms when they received outpatient palliative care provided by a team of providers vs. standard care from a single provider, according to the results of a randomized clinical trial published in JAMA Neurology.

A new point-of-care clinical decision tool, PEN-FAST, may help identify patients with reported penicillin allergies who can safely undergo oral challenges and receive beta-lactam antibiotics without needing formal allergy testing, according to research published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Researchers said they have developed a novel tool that uses artificial intelligence to help ICU physicians ascertain if a patient does not require an intervention and intense monitoring — allowing them to focus instead on more critical or unstable patients.

More than 118,300 cases of COVID-19 and 4,200 related deaths have been identified worldwide, including 938 cases and 29 deaths in the United States, according to WHO and the CDC.