BACKGROUND Preoperative consultations by internal medicine physicians facilitate documentation of comorbid disease, optimization of medical conditions, risk stratification, and initiation of interventions intended to reduce risk. Nonetheless, the impact of these consultations, which may be performed by general internists or specialists, on outcomes is unclear. METHODS We used population-based...

If there is a suspicion of Lyme disease, a blood sample of a patient is sent to a medical laboratory. The laboratory performs a number of di erent blood examinations testing for antibodies against the Lyme disease bacteria. The total number of di erent examinations depends on the intermediate results of the blood count. The costs of each examination is paid by the health insurance company of th...

Quantitative measurements of changes in evolving brain pathology, such as multiple sclerosis lesions and brain tumors, are important for clinicians to perform pertinent diagnoses and to help in patient follow-up. Lesions or tumors can vary over time in size, shape, location and composition because of natural pathological processes or the effect of a drug treatment or therapy. In the past, peopl...

The economic view on today’s health care organizations insists on the integration of standardized process descriptions by Clinical Pathways and information technology (IT). The individuality of several treatments then again requires mechanisms for a flexible and agile alignment oft a treatment process at any time. This paper delineates an IT-system for an agile execution of medical treatment pr...

Hospitals often retain inadequate systems because they are concerned about the organisational and financial cost of IT investments that do not clearly lead to increased revenue. Previous work has not carefully examined the health care, organisational and business process issues caused by widespread under-investment in Health Information Systems, leading to compromised decision making. Methods: ...

After many years of experimental research software systems to support clinical decisionmaking are now moving into routine clinical practice. Most of the research to date has been on the efficacy of such systems, addressing the question of whether computer systems can significantly improve the quality of doctors' decision-making and patient management processes. The evidence that they can make a...

Objective: In order to evaluate the quality of postgraduate medical education in Germany, we examined how the learning of theoretical and practical competencies is conceptualized and how the learning process takes place in real terms. The training conditions, as perceived by medical residents, are compared with the learning objectives, as stated by the Federal Chamber of Physicians in its regul...

Sorption of ethylene oxide during and after gaseous sterilization is influenced by numerous factors. It was found that ethylene oxide desorption not only depends on material to be fumigated but also to a considerable degree on the wrapping material. Although polyethylene, polyamide (nylon), polytetrafluoroethylene (Teflon), silicone, aluminum, and glass beads contained no quantities of ethylene...

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