Archive for month: August, 2020

East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust, serving a local population of over 750,000, recently installed 224 wireless-enabled Roche Accu-Chek Inform II blood glucose meters in 130 point of care (POC) locations across seven hospital sites.  Linked to the cobas IT 1000 POC data management package, this fully connected glucose testing solution from Roche enhances patient safety by helping to ensure appropriate use of the meters and by providing a full audit trail for every test performed.

With critical care costs in the U.S. totalling roughly $80-100 billion per year, new research highlights Intensive Care Unit (ICU) telemedicine as key to enabling hospitals and health systems to improve patient care at lower cost. The study, which examined the impact of Philips’ remote Intensive Care Unit (eICU) program on 118,990 critical care patients, across 56 ICUs, 32 hospitals and 19 health systems over a five-year period, demonstrated reductions in both mortality and length of stay. The results were statistically significant on both an unadjusted and severity-adjusted basis. The key findings were that, compared to patients receiving usual ICU care, patients who received their ICU care from a hospital that utilized the eICU program were:
    

• 26% more likely to survive the ICU;
• Discharged from the ICU 20% faster;
• 16% more likely to survive hospitalisation and be discharged;
• Discharged from the hospital 15% faster.

    
“This is the first large-scale study that ties ICU telemedicine to both the improvement of patient outcomes and cost reduction through shorter length of stays in the ICU and hospital, and identifies the processes that achieved greater efficiency,” said Dr. Lilly. “These results point to a significant opportunity to better manage and treat our critical patients in this time of increasing pressure from healthcare reform to deliver high quality and cost-effective care.”  Hospitals and health systems that saw the largest reduction in length of stay and mortality rates were those that excelled in certain components of the program – involving people, technology and processes. As a result, the study revealed the following program design elements common to the most successful ICU telemedicine programs:
    

• Having an intensivist physician perform a remote review of the patient and care plan within one hour of ICU admission;
• Frequent collaborative review and use of performance data provided by the ICU telemedicine program;
• Faster response times to technology-based alerts and alarms for physiological and laboratory value instability;
• Increased rates of adherence to ICU best practices for those that are supported by the ICU telemedicine team;
• Interdisciplinary rounds;
• Institutional ICU committee effectiveness.

Philips Healthcarehttp://tinyurl.com/nbpqnez

A new methodology for rapidly measuring the level of antibiotic drug molecules in human blood serum has been developed, paving the way to applications within drug development and personalised medicine.
The study, describes the exploitation of a sensor for measuring the concentration of effective antibiotics in blood, giving an indication of their efficiency against disease causing pathogens, for instance multidrug resistant hospital ‘superbugs’.
This development could potentially give a far greater understanding of the effectiveness of drug dosages required for different individuals, reducing potential toxic effects, allowing personalised treatment for patients and leading to new insights into optimal clinical regimes, such as combination therapies.
When effective, antibiotic molecules impose cellular stress on a pathogen’s cell wall target, such as a bacterium, which contributes to its breakdown. However, competing molecules in solution, for example serum proteins, can affect the binding of the antibiotic to the bacterium, reducing the efficacy of the drug. Serum proteins bind to drugs in blood and, in doing so, reduce the amount of a drug present and its penetration into cell tissues.
As the amount of antibiotics that bind to serum proteins will vary between individuals, it is extremely valuable to be able to determine the precise amount of the drug that is bound to serum proteins, and how much is free in the blood, in order to be able to accurately calculate the optimum dosage.
Existing biosensors on the market do not measure cellular stress, however, the nanomechanical sensor exploited by a group of researchers from the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) at UCL, the University of Cambridge, the University of Queensland and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, can accurately measure this important information even when antibiotic drug molecules are only present at very low concentrations.
The researchers coated the surface of a nanomechanical cantilever array with a model bacterial membrane and used this as a surface stress sensor. The sensor is extremely sensitive to tiny bending signals caused by its interactions with the antibiotics, in this case, the FDA-approved vancomycin and the yet to be approved oritavancin, which appears to deal with certain vancomycin-resistant bacteria, in the blood serum.
This investigation has yielded the first experimental evidence that drug-serum complexes (the antibiotics bound to the competing serum proteins) do not induce stress on the bacteria and so could provide realistic in-vitro susceptibility tests for drugs and to define effective doses which are effective enough but less toxic to patients.
In the future, the researchers believe that with a suitably engineered surface probe, this sensor could be paired with customised drug delivery for anaesthetics, anti-cancer, anti-HIV and antibacterial therapies.
The lead author of the study, Dr. Joseph W. Ndieyira of the LCN, said ‘This discovery represents a major advance in our fundamental understanding of the pathways between chemical and mechanical signals in a complex media, such as blood serum, and how this information can be used to tune the efficacy of drugs and to minimise the potential toxic side effects.’ EurekAlert