Joint Commission Accreditation for CAH’s On Probation

From Modern Physician:

The Joint Commission’s accreditation program for critical-access hospitals was given a 180-day probationary period to fix gaps between its standards and revised sections of Medicare’s conditions of participation, the CMS announced in the Federal Register.

Ultrasound cuff to stop internal bleeding on battlefield

From CNET:

Internal bleeding can cause irreversible haemorrhagic shock within 30 seconds or progressive shock within eight hours, either way, it’s not good and the military wants a portable, noninvasive way to detect and stop it right on the battlefield.

To that end, the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has contracted with Siemens Healthcare, the University of Washington’s Centre for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound and Texas A&M to develop something called the Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation cuff (DBAC). The cuff is a semi-automated, ultrasound device designed to cut blood loss and shock resulting from combat limb injuries, one that can be operated by any GI with minimal training.

Newsweek: ED Overload

From Newsweek.com:

The modern emergency room, as most people think of it, has an emergency of its own: It’s packed, costly, noisy, and overrun by uninsured freeloaders who can’t legally be turned away once they walk through the ER doors. If you’ve actually been in an ER in the past few years, you know the first three things are true—but how much do you know about the rest of the people in the waiting room? As it turns out, they’re not disproportionately uninsured patients with nowhere else to turn. They’re more likely to be people who do have insurance, and according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the reasons they’re backing up in ERs go much deeper than who’s paying for their care. NEWSWEEK’s Mary Carmichael asked Dr. Manya Newton, an emergency physician at the University of Michigan, Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, and the lead author of the new paper, to explain the problem.