Healthcare

In healthcare, the Association of perioperative Registered Nurses (AORN), a U.S.-based professional nurses organization, has put in effect a voluntary near miss incident reporting system covering medication or transfusion reactions, communication or consent issues, wrong patient or procedures, communication breakdown, or technology malfunctions. An analysis of incidents allows safety alerts to be issued to AORN members. 

The Patient Safety Reporting System (PSRS) is a program modeled on the Aviation Safety Reporting System and developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to monitor patient safety through voluntary, confidential reports. 

The near miss incident registry is a risk free, anonymous reporting tool for near miss incidents in internal medicine. It is sponsored by the New York State Department of Health and administered by the New York chapter of the American College of Physicians. This tool collects information about both near miss incident medical errors and the barriers that kept these errors from reaching patients. 

In the U.S., healthcare is an industry in turmoil. Much of the turmoil is due to the complexity of the supply chain, which includes medical service providers, medical groups, insurance companies, employers, government regulators and, of course, users of healthcare services. Most people don t pay directly for healthcare services. Private companies, through their employee benefit plans, and the government, through Medicare and Medicaid, pay most of the bills. 

The industry accounts for 14% of the U.S. economy, but many payers feel they aren t getting their money s worth. Studies point to waste from lack of — or failure in — basic quality-control procedures. There are many anecdotes pointing out that the frequency of use has more to do with the available capacity than medical need. The disconnect between the payers and users is often blamed for building wasteful habifs into industry management practices. 

The industry contains supply chains of several fypes. There are professional services, including physician and hospifal services. There are lucrative patented pharmaceutical products, often developed at great expense. The industry also needs a plethora of support equipment ranging from sophisticated electronic testing equipment to gloves used in patient treatment. 

The challenges for the next century in healthcare are (i) an ever increasing number of patients with allergic, inheritable or contagious diseases and cancers, (ii) demographic trends and (iii) the exploding costs of healthcare. 

Nanotechnology has the potential to revolutionize medical technologies and therapies, by providing the tools to cope with these challenges. The health sector will greatly benefit from the new products and technologies provided by materials 

Note that the focus here was on materials for healthcare, because this is the area that needs to be fostered from recent developments in science. The identification and design of new active pharmaceutical ingredients is clearly equally important, but innovation in this area is already a driver. 

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Data-Star. This is Europe s leading on-line database service (39) and covers worldwide business news, financial information, market research, trade statistics, business analysis, healthcare / pharmaceuticals, chemicals / petrochemicals, chemical industry, biomedicine /life science, biotechnology, and technology, with an emphasis on Europe. It was originally formed as a joint venture among BRS, Predicasts, and Radio Suisse (the Swiss telecommunications company) (37). Data-Star offers access to about 300 bibliographic, abstract, directory, and fuU-text on-line databases, of which approximately 150 are also available on Dialog (40). 

In 1982 a study of the usefulness of DBBF in the production of a blood substitute was reported (99). A single modification achieved the dual goals of reduced oxygen affinity and restricted tetramer—dimer dissociation. This work was confirmed in 1987 (98). The product, called aa-hemoglobin, was formulated in Ringer s lactate. P q under physiologic conditions is 3.7 kPa (28.0 torr). Hill s parameter is 2.2, and the Bohr effect was reduced (100). Plasma retention was increased, and the product appeared to be less heterogeneous than some of the other derivatives under study. Its production was scaled up by Baxter Healthcare Corp., under contract to the U.S. Army. 

Hyland Division = Baxter Healthcare Corp., Glendale, Calif. 

The Contraceptive diaphragm, Emory University, School of Medicine, Healthcare Communications Network, New York, 1989. 

Tests have been developed that test different products for their effectiveness as a healthcare personnel handwash (327) evaluate hand disinfectants for use in surgery (333) determine the effectiveness of a surgical hand scmb, ie, the glove juice test (311,329) evaluate antiseptics for the oral cavity to be used in mouthwashes (334,335) and test antiseptics for the periurethral area and appHcation to catheters (336,337). A method used for a test comparing four antiseptic products was adopted as recommended practice by the Association of Practitioners of Infection Control (338). 

Ulman, K.L. and Thomas, X., Silicone Pressure Sensitive adhesives for healthcare applications. In Advances in Pressure Sensitive Adhesive Technology-2. Satas Donatas Ed., Satas and Associates, Rhodes Island, 1995, pp. 133-157. 

Product name (Generic, Trade Names, Manufacturer/ Distributor) Fibrin Sealant, Hemaseel APR, Haemacure, Tisseel VH, Baxter Healthcare Platelet Gel, Medtronic Harvest Technologies, and others Collagen Enhanced Fibrin Sealant, CoStasis, Cohesion Technologies, US Surgical Collagen -F Thrombin, FloSeal, Fusion Medical, Proceed Sulzer Medica... 

Infinity Industries McNeil Consumer Healthcare Par Pharmaceuticals Penick... 

McNeil Consumer Healthcare Company, 234, 238 MCP Group, See Mining Chemical Products Ltd. (UK), 212 MCP Metalspecialties Inc., 212, 238 MCPA, 87... 

Lighting Research Center. (1996). Prudential HealthCare, Albany, New York, DELTA Portfolio 1(5). Troy, NY Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 

There are many protocols and different types of platforms available, e.g. GeneChips from Affymetrix, Illumina Bead Arrays, Arrays from Agilent, Applied Biosystems, GE Healthcare, customized spotted cDNA microarrays etc. the basic procedure for a large-scale measurement of gene expression involves the preparation of total or mRNA from the biological sample(s) under investigation (e.g. candidate tissue) and the hybridization of copied labelled RNA or cDNA to the DNA elements on the array surface (Fig. 1). 

Jai Moo Shin, George Sachs David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California at Los Angeles and Veterans Administration Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System,... 

Pharmacopoeia publications provide a final important source of information for the pharmaceutical industry, regulatory authorities, and the healthcare professions. These are concerned with establishing quality standards. These publications include monographs that define specifications for the purity and identity of established pharmaceutical ingredients, both active and non-active, together with recognised analytical methods that may be used to evaluate them. The most relevant are the United States Pharmacopoeia (USP) and the European Pharmacopoeia (Ph.Eur). 

The need to inform healthcare professionals or patients about an identified risk, without delay. 

Manufacturers should also report incidents where user error resulted in death or a serious deterioration in the state of health, or created a serious threat to public health. The manufacturer is also obliged to monitor trends and report where a significant increase in the level of incidents is observed, even if individual incidents would not be reportable in isolation. Abnormal use events should be addressed to the healthcare facility where they occur. The manufacturer should endeavour to report incidents immediately, once they become aware of the suspected involvement of their device, but in any event the following time limits must be respected ... 

Remedial action taken by the healthcare ladiity relevant to the care of the patient... 

Septivon (Chefaro-ArdevaI)-comb. Solubacter (Boots Healthcare)... 

Chief of Staff, VA Connecticut Healthcare System, West Haven, Connecticut Professor of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut... 

Associate Professor, Division of Psychiatry, Boston University School of Medicine Associate Chief of Psychiatry, Boston VA Healthcare System, Boston, Massachusetts... 

Kyriopoulos et al. (1995) compared different estimates of HIV/AIDS healthcare expenditure in Greece based on study years 1987-1993. Average annual cost per... 

Comparisons between Enropean stndies are also difficult. Tolley and Gyldmark (1993) reviewed costs of treatment, care, and support for HIV-positive and AIDS patients in eleven Enropean conntries, which were based on data from the second half of the eighties. The anthors inflated cost fignres to 1990 prices and converted them from local currency to US by using national healthcare-specific price indices and health-specific purchasing power parities. The standardized cost estimates ranged between US 1,700 (social care per HIV-positive) and US 28,200 (hospital care per AIDS person-year), with the exception of a Greek study, which produced an adjusted cost estimate for the hospital treatment and care of AIDS patients of US 70,400 per person-year. 

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