Penn Medicine News Blog Archive: Patient Care

Over 350 people/teams participated in Penn Medicine's MyHeartMap Challenge, hunting down more than 1,500 AEDs, in about 800 unique buildings around the city of Philadelphia. AEDs were most commonly located in office buildings, gyms and recreation centers, and schools. Each one of the AEDs found represents fresh chances to save lives from sudden cardiac arrest, which claims the lives of more than 300,000 Americans each year.

The Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (PLM) is celebrating National Medical Laboratory Professionals Week April 22 to 28. Medical laboratory professionals are among the unsung heroes of patient care - the team behind the scenes who are “doing the best with every test.”

To hospital patients in America, it may seem obvious that their care team – doctors, nurses, technicians, social workers and many other staff – works together to ensure they’re getting proper treatment and monitoring during their stay. But this relationship – often referred to as “interprofessionalism” – has not always been so obvious. Efforts are now under way across the nation to encourage it to flourish in all levels of medical education and hospital care and to foster it in a way that most benefits patients.

Approximately 12 million Americans are seen in U.S. emergency departments each year for mental health-related symptoms. Of those patients, around 650,000 are evaluated for suicide attempts. For many of these people, it’s a frightening stop on the long and painful road of suffering that results from depression, anxiety, and substance...

The Choosing Wisely initiative, announced last week by the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation, aims to spark conversation among both doctors and their patients about the types of tests and treatments that are likely to be unnecessary, and perhaps even harmful. More tests, the group explains, does not always mean better care – and overuse of these diagnostics is a huge contributor to the United States’ surging medical costs. The issue of overtesting is a special challenge for emergency physicians. Most of the time, patients are unknown to them, and sometimes, unconscious or otherwise too sick to explain their symptoms or medical history. That often means starting from scratch with determining what might be wrong, and making calls to their previous physicians doesn’t always yield answers, especially during off hours.

David Grande, MD, MPA, assistant professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine and a senior fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, helps break down the oral arguments the Supreme Court will hear regarding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

New research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania indicates that modern techniques used in rhinoplasty are showing excellent improvements in patients’ quality of life and function as compared to older techniques used for the procedure.

Jesse Taylor, MD, assistant professor in Plastic Surgery, is using 3D computer-aided design (CAD) to plan out a surgery to restructure someone's face. Dr. Taylor walks through a recent surgery, one of the most complicated cases he's done, of a patient whose facial structure was significantly impacted by a rare genetic condition called Saethre-Chotzen syndrome (SCS).

Earlier this year, the Penn campus received a visit from one of the nation’s most prominent sociologists of medicine and health care –- Paul Starr, PhD. As Joshua Metlay, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and epidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine, said in his introduction, Starr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982), “is the mandatory starting point” in discussions of health care’s future and health care’s reform. As the Republican presidential primaries show, that topic remains one of the most important issues in the nation. Starr is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University.

Would you be able to find an automated external defibrillator if someone’s life depended on it? Despite an estimated one million AEDs scattered around the United States, the answer, all too often when people suffer sudden cardiac arrests, is no. In a Perspective piece published online this week in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality Outcomes, Penn Medicine emergency physician Dr. Raina Merchant outlines the tremendous potential associated with greater utilization of AEDs in public places. In cases of ventricular fibrillation – a wild, disorganized cardiac rhythm that leaves the heart unable to properly pump blood through the body, which is the leading cause of sudden cardiac death – quick use of an AED and CPR improve a patient’s chance of surviving by more than 50 percent.