Time to Eliminate Dangerous Injection Practices by Clinicians

By Barbara Ficarra, RN, BSN, MPA Thanks to Laura Landro for shining light on unsafe injections in her WSJ blog, “Unsafe Injection Practices Persist Despite Education Efforts.” Landro writes: “A new push is underway to eliminate unsafe injection practices, which remain a persistent safety problem despite years of efforts to educate clinicians about the risks of re-using needles, syringes and drug vials. In the U.S., failure to follow safe practices in delivering intravenous medications and…

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Patient-Centric Care Delivered with Patient-Friendly Apps

How to deliver patient-centric information By Barbara Ficarra, RN, BSN, MPA What if you could find out what your health care team is doing at any given moment while you wait in the emergency department or you are an admitted patient in the hospital. Dr. Bill Crounse, host of Health Tech Today talks with Microsoft researchers; Dan Morris and Amy Karlson (part of the team of Microsoft researchers) and they are investigating this question, “How…

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Speaking Diabetes: A Guide from an Insider

Guest post by Miriam E. Tucker Just as physicians use abbreviations and terminology that sound like a foreign language to outsiders, patients who talk to each other on the Internet (and elsewhere) have developed their own quirky code words and phrases. Here’s some of the lingo used by those with diabetes: D-anything – Placing a “d” in front of any word makes it uniquely diabetically ours. One prominent example is DLife, the weekly CNBC television…

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Fill Up on Fiber to Fight Cancer

Guest post submitted by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center When you think fiber, what comes to mind? Your favorite breakfast bar or a sugar substitute with added fiber? Think again! The best source of this important nutrient is natural plant-based foods. According to the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR), plant-based foods rich in dietary fiber may reduce your risk for colorectal cancer. That’s because the more fiber you consume, the less…

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