OBJECTIVES The study assessed dexmedetomidine utilization and practice variation over time in ventilated pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) patients; and evaluated differences in hospital outcomes between high- and low-dexmedetomidine utilization hospitals. STUDY DESIGN This serial cross-sectional analysis used administrative data from PICU admissions in the pediatric health information sys...

INTRODUCTION The purpose of our study was to describe the evaluation and outcome of patients with ileus and bowel obstruction admitted to an emergency department (ED) observation unit (OU) and to identify predictors of successful management for such patients. METHODS We performed a retrospective chart review of 129 patients admitted to a university-affiliated, urban, tertiary hospital ED OU f...

Glycemic variability (GV) is reportedly a predictor for poor outcome in various clinical conditions. We aimed to assess whether GV during hospital admission is associated with poor outcomes in patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) and diabetes. We prospectively enrolled consecutive patients with AIS from the registry of 6 tertiary hospitals between January 2013 and December 2014. For the GV...

Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) are one of the most commonly prescribed groups of drug in Ireland, at great expense to the Irish healthcare executive. This study aims to evaluate the appropriateness of PPI prescriptions on admission and discharge in a tertiary referral hospital. All non-elective admissions in the Emergency Department in one week were included in the study. 102 patients in total w...

Accurate hospital admission/initial history and physical examination [H&P] notes are vital to support patient care. We aimed to assess the quality of H&P notes and to compare medical/surgical, and inpatient/outpatient H&P notes. A cross-sectional study examined 154 initial H&P notes for the adherence to a standard protocol in a tertiary referral hospital. 134 doctors (87.1%) adhered to the corr...

For a semisimple Lie algebra admitting a good enumeration, we prove a parameterization for the elements in its Weyl group. As an application, we give coordinate-free comparison between the crystal graph description (when it is known) and the Lie-theoretic description of the Weyl group multiple Dirichlet series in the stable range.

Let Ω ⊂⊂ C n , n ≥ 3, be a smoothly bounded domain. Suppose that Ω admits a smooth defining function which is plurisubharmonic on the boundary of Ω. Then the Diederich-Fornaess exponent can be chosen arbitrarily close to 1, and the closure of Ω admits a Stein neighborhood basis.

Designs over finite fields arise by replacing finite sets by vector spaces and orders of sets by dimensions of vector spaces. More formally, a t− (v, k, λ; q) design is a collection of k-subspaces over Fq , called blocks, such that each t-subspace is contained in exactly λ blocks. Such a design over a finite field is called simple, if no repeated blocks occur in the collection. Otherwise, the d...