INTRODUCTION: Hospital admissions reflect the pattern of illnesses in society, and itsdocumentation various localities may provide clues on decision-making implementationsin health sector. This study aimed to ascertain reasons for admission outcome themedical wards Federal Medical Centre, Yenagoa, Nigeria.METHODS: The medical records all patients admitted into during thestudy were retrospective...

Primary care physicians often prescribe contraceptives to women of reproductive age with comorbidities. Novel delivery systems (e.g., contraceptive patch, contraceptive ring, single-rod implantable device) may change traditional risk and benefit profiles in women with comorbidities. Effective contraceptive counseling requires an understanding of a woman's preferences and medical history, as wel...

BACKGROUND Understanding of the impact of depressive and anxiety disorders on functional health status in the context of chronic medical illness has been gained almost exclusively from the study of patient populations. AIMS To compare the impact of major depressive and generalised anxiety disorder with that of chronic medical conditions on functional health in a UK resident population. METH...

BACKGROUND Physicians are facing ever-increasing legal obligations in all Canadian jurisdictions to report patients believed to be unfit to drive a motor vehicle or pilot an aircraft. In most Canadian jurisdictions these statutory obligations are mandatory; in others, they are discretionary. OBJECTIVES To provide a legal perspective on a physician's duty to report in the various jurisdictions...

BACKGROUND Public reporting on quality aims to help patients select better hospitals. However, individual quality measures are suboptimal in identifying superior and inferior hospitals based on outcome performance. OBJECTIVE To combine structure, process, and outcome measures into an empirically derived composite quality measure for heart failure (HF), acute myocardial infarction (AMI), and p...

Gastrointestinal (GI) illnesses are common in athletes. Various causes include adverse physiologic adaptations of the gut during exercise; excess ingestion of carbohydrate drinks, alcohol, and anti-inflammatory medications; emotional stressors; exposure to pathogens in closed environments and during travel; trauma; and abdominal wall pressure overload. Unfortunately, evidence-based management o...

BACKGROUND While prior studies describe the clinical presentation of patients requiring paramedic out-of-hospital endotracheal intubation (ETI), limited data characterize the underlying medical conditions or comorbidities. OBJECTIVE To characterize the medical conditions and comorbidities of patients receiving successful paramedic out-of-hospital ETI. METHODS We used Pennsylvania statewide ...

OBJECTIVE With performance-based reimbursement pressures, it is concerning that most performance measurements treat each condition in isolation, ignoring the complexities of patients with multiple comorbidities. We sought to examine the relationship between comorbidity and commonly assessed services for diabetic patients in a managed care organization. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS In 6,032 dia...

Efficient unsupervised algorithms for the detection of patterns in time series data, often called motifs, have been used in many applications, such as identifying words in different languages, detecting anomalies in ECG readings, and finding similarities between images. We present a process that creates a personalized multivariate time series representation a Multivariate Time Series Amalgam (M...