Posted on February 5th, 2012 by Jesse Gould
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In the linked study (doi:10.1136/bmj.d8009), Hippisley-Cox and Coupland look at a different aspect of the diagnosis of ovarian cancer—that of computer assisted diagnosis. They identified the symptoms of ovarian cancer in a large electronic database, created a predictive algorithm, and then tested it in a different subset of the database. The algorithm performed well, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 84%. The authors hope that their algorithm could be used routinely to identify women at high risk of harbouring ovarian cancer who could then be offered testing. How realistic is this?
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Filed under: Health, Information Technology, Research
Posted on February 5th, 2012 by Catherine Obuch
HEALTH Services Union whistleblower Kathy Jackson has been accused of destroying documents and laundering money through a colleague’s bank account, according to a leaked email obtained by The Sydney Morning Herald.
Ms Jackson, the national secretary of the union, has described the allegations as ”entirely false”.
Ruth Kershaw, a prominent union economist who previously worked with Ms Jackson at the Health Services Union in Melbourne, made the explosive claims in an email to Struan Robertson, a former industrial officer with the union and the half-brother of the man at the centre of the scandal, federal Labor MP Craig Thomson.
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(Picture courtesy of www.theage.com.au)
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Filed under: Career, Health, Management, Medicolegal
Posted on February 4th, 2012 by Jesse Gould
A BABY who died of oxygen deprivation at birth did not get adequate care, a coroner has found.
Summer Niehoff died 57 minutes after her birth at Box Hill Hospital on August 30, 2007.
A coroner found this week that closer monitoring of her heart rate in the hours before her birth may have saved her.
Better pain relief would have improved monitoring of mum Brooke Niehoff’s contractions and the baby’s heart function, Dr Jane Hendtlass found.
Ms Niehoff was given oxytocin to speed labour. It can cause the uterus to contract too frequently or for too long, depriving the baby of oxygen, Dr Hendtlass said.
The coroner could not determine whether the baby’s oxygen deprivation was caused by this complication.
Information provided to the medical team on whether to change the oxytocin dose or opt for a caesarean was inadequate and may have contributed to Summer’s death, Dr Hendtlass said.
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Filed under: Hospital Events
Posted on February 4th, 2012 by Jesse Gould
SIXTEEN years after Dolly the sheep was cloned in Edinburgh, scientists in Scotland have made another startling medical breakthrough.
Researchers at Edinburgh’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine have created brain tissue from patients suffering mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression.
“A patient’s neurones can tell us a great deal about the psychological conditions that affect them, but you cannot stick a needle in someone’s brain and take out its cells,” the centre’s director, Professor Charles ffrench-Constant, told the Guardian.
“However, we have found a way round that. We can take a skin sample, make stem cells from it and then direct these stem cells to grow into brain cells. Essentially, we are turning a person’s skin cells into brain.”
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Filed under: Health
Posted on February 3rd, 2012 by Jesse Gould
Electronic prescribing systems could drastically cut previously intractable hospital medication errors, a study of two Sydney hospitals has found.
The federal government will begin rolling out an e-health system across the country in July, but it has been plagued by criticisms it would not reduce risks for patients and could be dangerous.
Until now, there was little evidence electronic prescribing, where doctors enter prescriptions into computer programs that often include information on patients and the other drugs they are on, would cut medication errors, the study leader, Johanna Westbrook, said.
“But we found a significant and very large reduction in overall prescribing error rates . . . and in serious errors,” she said.
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Filed under: e Health
