Nominations for the International Hospital Federation Awards are due on 17 May 2019. All hospitals and health service providers that want their outstanding projects and programs recognized internationally are encouraged to submit their entries now for a chance to bag one of the four awards.
IHF/Dr Kwang Tae Kim Grand Award

Open to IHF Full and Associate Members and their healthcare provider members. This recognizes excellence and achievements at health system or facility level in multiple areas including quality and patient safety, corporate social responsibility, innovations in service delivery at affordable costs, and healthcare leadership and management practices. To check if your organization or association is an IHF member, click here.

IHF Excellence Awards
These awards are open to all IHF Member and non-member public and private healthcare provider organizations. These recognize excellence or outstanding achievements in specific fields:

• IHF/Bionexo Excellence Award for Corporate Social Responsibility 
• IHF/EOH Excellence Award for Leadership and Management in Healthcare 
• IHF/Austco Excellence Award for Quality & Safety and Patient-centered Care 

The nomination process is simple and there is no cost to enter. Interested organizations just need to create an account in the IHF Awards website and complete the entry form.
Winners will be awarded in front of industry peers during the 43^rd IHF World Hospital Congress in Muscat, Oman in November. The Awards Ceremony will once again provide organizations from across the globe the opportunity to come together and celebrate the hard work they have put in to their outstanding programs.  https://congress.ihf-fih.org/ihf_awards

Rapid whole-genome sequencing (WGS) of acutely ill neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) patients in the first few days of life yields clinically useful diagnoses in many cases, and results in lower aggregate costs than the current standard of care, according to recent  findings.
Shimul Chowdhury, PhD, FACMG, Clinical Laboratory Director at the Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine, and his colleagues focused their analysis on a broad swath of NICU patients for whom a genetic diagnosis might help inform treatment decisions and disease management. They studied the clinical utility and cost-effectiveness of sequencing infants and their parents.
“Newborns often don’t fit traditional methods of diagnosis, as they may present with non-specific symptoms or display different signs from older children,” said Dr. Chowdhury. In many such cases, he explained, sequencing can pinpoint the cause of illness, yielding a diagnosis that allows doctors to modify inpatient treatment and resulting in dramatically improved medical outcomes in both the short and long term.
Because of the potential for early intervention and immediate adjustment in care, the researchers used a rapid WGS procedure that took three to seven days from sample collection to delivering results to patients’ families. The process can be further accelerated if medically necessary. In contrast, most clinical diagnostic tests take four to six weeks.
In 34 (35%) of the 98 patients enrolled in the study, WGS yielded a genetic diagnosis, and in 28 (80%) of those patients, that diagnosis led to changes in medical management, such as the use of medications targeted to the underlying disease, avoidance of unnecessary surgery, and guidance about palliative care. Cost-effectiveness analyses are ongoing, but among the first 42 infants sequenced, the researchers calculated a $1.3 million net cost savings for that hospitalization versus the current standard of care.
“The cost savings were especially striking, given that sequencing costs are still high – even with those costs, we found that rapid WGS was not just clinically useful but economically prudent,” Dr. Chowdhury said. Currently, the researchers are looking to expand their study and assess the effectiveness of their approach across health systems and populations. Ongoing partnerships with children’s hospitals in California and Minnesota involve scaling up the rapid WGS process to meet demand and yield new insights about its clinical utility, cost-effectiveness, and ease of implementation in different environments.
Dr. Chowdhury noted the important contribution of genetics research to their progress so far. “Translational research leading to improvements in the speed and accuracy of sequencing tests is so important to our work, and has a real impact on patients and their families,” he said.

American Society of Human Geneticshttps://tinyurl.com/yda3rc6g

Researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have developed a predictive model that could guide clinicians in deciding when to give potentially life-saving drugs to patients being treated for sepsis in the emergency room.
Sepsis is one of the most frequent causes of admission, and one of the most common causes of death, in the intensive care unit. But the vast majority of these patients first come in through the ER. Treatment usually begins with antibiotics and intravenous fluids, a couple litres at a time. If patients don’t respond well, they may go into septic shock, where their blood pressure drops dangerously low and organs fail. Then it’s often off to the ICU, where clinicians may reduce or stop the fluids and begin vasopressor medications such as norepinephrine and dopamine, to raise and maintain the patient’s blood pressure.
That’s where things can get tricky. Administering fluids for too long may not be useful and could even cause organ damage, so early vasopressor intervention may be beneficial. In fact, early vasopressor administration has been linked to improved mortality in septic shock. On the other hand, administering vasopressors too early, or when not needed, carries its own negative health consequences, such as heart arrhythmias and cell damage. But there’s no clear-cut answer on when to make this transition; clinicians typically must closely monitor the patient’s blood pressure and other symptoms, and then make a judgment call.
In a paper, researchers describe a model that “learns” from health data on emergency-care sepsis patients and predicts whether a patient will need vasopressors within the next few hours. For the study, the researchers compiled the first-ever dataset of its kind for ER sepsis patients. In testing, the model could predict a need for a vasopressor more than 80 percent of the time.
Early prediction could, among other things, prevent an unnecessary ICU stay for a patient that doesn’t need vasopressors, or start early preparation for the ICU for a patient that does, the researchers say.
“It’s important to have good discriminating ability between who needs vasopressors and who doesn’t [in the ER],” says first author Varesh Prasad, a PhD student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. “We can predict within a couple of hours if a patient needs vasopressors. If, in that time, patients got three litres of IV fluid, that might be excessive. If we knew in advance those litres weren’t going to help anyway, they could have started on vasopressors earlier.”
In a clinical setting, the model could be implemented in a bedside monitor, for example, that tracks patients and sends alerts to clinicians in the often-hectic ER about when to start vasopressors and reduce fluids. “This model would be a vigilance or surveillance system working in the background,” says co-author Thomas Heldt, the W. M. Keck Career Development Professor in the MIT Institute of Medical Engineering and Science. “There are many cases of sepsis that [clinicians] clearly understand, or don’t need any support with. The patients might be so sick at initial presentation that the physicians know exactly what to do. But there’s also a ‘gray zone,’ where these kinds of tools become very important.”

MIThttps://tinyurl.com/y7rljbeu

Abington Hospital – Jefferson Health has been recognized as a Baby-Friendly hospital by Baby-Friendly USA, Inc. This designation recognizes Abington Hospital for the optimal level of care it provides breastfeeding mothers and their babies.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) launched the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) in 1991. This initiative is centered around the Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding; a plan developed by global experts. Hospitals that provide mothers with the information, skills and confidence they need to successfully initiate and continue breastfeeding are recognized as Baby-Friendly. The World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA) coordinates World Breastfeeding Week, which is recognized annually August 1 to 7, to protect, promote and support breastfeeding mothers worldwide.
“We are committed to providing new mothers with the information and skills needed to confidently feed their babies,” says Dr. Steven Shapiro, Chair, Department of Pediatrics. “Abington Hospital is so proud to have achieved this designation which reflects the great efforts of our doctors, nurses and staff.”  
In order to be considered for designation, Abington Hospital completed a rigorous on-site survey. The award will be maintained by upholding the practice of the Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding.
The BFHI continues to grow with Baby-Friendly hospitals now in all 50 states and 24 percent of births taking place in the more than 500 Baby-Friendly designated facilities. Nearly 5,000 babies are delivered per year at Abington Hospital. The BFHI initiative used in Abington Hospital encourages the use of evidence-based care and has seen tremendous success in helping mothers reach their breastfeeding goals.
https://www.abingtonhealth.org/

Researchers have reported an approach to photoacoustic imaging that offers vastly improved resolution, setting the stage for detailed in vivo imaging of deep tissue. The technique is based on computational improvements, so it can be performed with existing imaging hardware, and thus could provide a practical and low-cost option for improving biomedical imaging for research and diagnostics.
After further refinements, the approach could offer the opportunity to observe the minute details of processes occurring in living tissue, such as the growth of tiny blood vessels, and therefore provide insights on normal development or disease processes such as cancer.
“Our main goal is to develop a microscope that can see the microvasculature and capillary vessels,” said Ori Katz, a researcher with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and senior author of the study. “It’s important to be able to watch these grow with nearby tumours, for example.”
The researchers describe overcoming the acoustic diffraction limit, a barrier that previously limited the resolution obtainable with photoacoustic imaging, by exploiting signal fluctuations stemming from the natural motion of red blood cells. Such fluctuations might otherwise be considered noise or viewed as detrimental to the measurements.
“With photoacoustic imaging you can see much deeper in tissue than you can with an optical microscope, but the resolution is limited by the acoustic wavelength,” Katz said. “What we have discovered is a way to obtain photoacoustic images with considerably better resolution, without any change in the hardware.”
Photoacoustic imaging combines optical illumination (which uses light waves) and ultrasound (which uses sound waves) to image biological samples in ways that would not be possible with either modality alone. Optical methods can provide excellent resolution but often only near the surface as light is highly scattered in tissue. Ultrasound can go much deeper but does not offer the same contrast as optical imaging. By integrating the two modalities, researchers have been able to overcome the drawbacks of each to advance a host of applications.
However, the imaging technique does have certain limitations. Photoacoustic imaging relies on acoustic detection, so the image resolution is determined by the acoustic wavelength. While optical microscopy, for example, can see objects on the scale of less than a micron, photoacoustic imaging is limited to tens of microns. This means that photoacoustic imaging cannot resolve small objects like microvessels or capillaries.
Katz devised the method for surpassing the acoustic diffraction limit in collaboration with Emmanuel Bossy, now at Université Grenoble Alpes in Grenoble, France. At the heart of their work is an advanced statistical analysis framework that they apply to images of red blood cells flowing through the vessels; the blood cells facilitate imaging by absorbing light at particular wavelengths. By increasing the resolution computationally, they avoided the need for any additional hardware, so the advances described can be attained using existing photoacoustic imaging systems.
 The tools needed to achieve super-resolution with photoacoustic imaging were described nearly a decade ago in a work in optical microscopy with the technique of super-resolution optical fluctuation imaging (SOFI). Katz and colleagues came to this work after grappling with the problem of the acoustic diffraction limit and discovered that the same mathematics used with SOFI could be used for improving photoacoustic imaging.
“Someone just needed to make the connection,” Katz said. “It’s the same equation—the wave equation. Mathematically, you could say it’s the same problem.”
Katz and his colleagues demonstrated the ability to surpass the acoustic diffraction limit using a SOFI-inspired photoacoustic imaging technique. That work had two main limitations. First, it required the use of a long-coherence laser, not a standard part of photoacoustic imaging systems, in order to form dynamic structured interference patterns called speckle to create the signal fluctuations. Second, due to their small dimensions, the use of speckles as dynamic illumination resulted in the fluctuations having a low amplitude with respect to the mean photoacoustic signal, which in turn made it difficult to resolve the specimen in question.
In the new study, the researchers showed that they could overcome these limitations by applying the statistical analysis framework to the inherent signal fluctuations caused by the flow of red blood cells—so the researchers didn’t need to rely on coherent structured illumination—and furthermore demonstrated experimentally that they could perform super-resolution photoacoustic imaging using a conventional imaging system.
The demonstration served as a proof of principle for the new technique. The researchers are now focused on developing it further, to fulfill its potential for in vivo applications.
Katz described two main challenges in reaching this goal. The first is the problem of motion artifacts. In their demonstration, the researchers imaged blood streaming through small tubes. In animal models and in humans, though, blood flow is only one of the motions they would have to consider. The technique would also need to account for the heartbeat, the changing volume of the vessels and even microscale movements of the tissue itself.
The other main challenge relates to signal levels. In recent experiments blood was the only absorber in play, but in real-world scenarios other absorbers would be present. The researchers are now working on ways to better see the signal originating from flow while suppressing any background signals.

The Optical Societyhttps://tinyurl.com/ybrr85l8