The drugmaker spent $3.8 million on business meals and travel for doctors and health care organizations.

My latest. Read the whole shebang.

The number of Americans who act as caregivers for infirm loved ones continues to grow, as do the emotional, financial and medical burdens these family caregivers carry as a result. But experts said the health care system — physicians, nurses, hospitals and manufacturers of medical equipment used at home — can help make family caregivers’ unpaid work a little easier to bear.

The newest figures, released in July by AARP, show that about 42.1 million Americans in 2009 regularly helped an adult loved one with tasks such as cooking, bathing, paying bills, visiting physicians and managing medications. That number, which equals about one in seven Americans, rose 24% from 2007.

“Being a caregiver is becoming a fact of life — we call it the new normal,” said Susan C. Reinhard, PhD, co-author of the AARP report. “If we were to try to hire people to do all the things that all the family caregivers do, it would equal $450 billion a year.”

My latest. Read the whole shebang.

The proportion of inpatient care provided by hospitalists has more than quadrupled since 1995, and many studies have found that patients cared for by hospitalists go home sooner than those who receive hospital care from their primary care physicians.

Shorter lengths of stay save hospitals money and could be a sign of higher-quality care, but a new study of nearly 60,000 Medicare patients over five years sheds light on how hospitalist-treated patients fare after they are discharged.

The patients cared for by hospitalists were discharged more than half a day earlier than patients treated by their primary care physicians, and their hospital charges were $282 lower on average. But the hospitalists’ patients were 18% more likely to visit the emergency department within 30 days of leaving the hospital and 8% likelier to be rehospitalized within a month.

My latest. Read the whole shebang.

Despite years of guidelines urging simpler and easier-to-understand informed-consent documents, the forms given to clinical trial participants remain too long and use language that is too complex.

A review of 124 informed-consent documents used in 21 HIV clinical trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health’s Division of AIDS found that the forms were typically written above the ninth-grade level and ran longer than 22 pages. The findings were published online July 6 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

“Very few people are going to sit down and read a document that’s that long, and the goal is to have people understand,” said Nancy Kass, ScD, lead author of the study. “The whole reason for putting [informed consent] in writing is with the belief that someone will read it. The longer it is, the less likely people are to read it all the way through, and then you have defeated your own purpose.”

My latest. Read the whole shebang.

One step to safer surgeries may be potluck lunches.

Arranging social occasions where members of the surgical team can get to know one another as individuals is part of the patient safety approach that Andrew S. Klein, MD, is pursuing as chair of surgery and transplant medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

“In the operating room, we’re all camouflaged in our gowns and masks and gloves,” Dr. Klein said. “If I ask for one instrument and I get the wrong one, my options could be to swear and yell or throw that instrument on the floor. But if I know the person, if I know something about them, there is a well of good will, and you don’t react that way.”

My latest. Read the whole shebang.

My lede:

Chicago — A photograph captures an Afghan girl’s tears as her wrist injury is examined. A painting bursting with color shows the explosive effect of a roadside bomb. A mixed-media piece portrays the emotional turmoil some physicians experience after treating traumatic war injuries.

These pieces — created by orthopedic surgeons who have cared for those wounded in wartime — are just a few of the striking artworks on display through Aug. 31 as part of a free exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Read the whole shebang, and see the slide show.

The new editor-in-chief says medical journals must explore every avenue for communicating with doctors and the public.

Read the whole shebang.

My lede:

Checklists have been used successfully to improve surgical safety and cut infection rates in the intensive care unit, but a study suggests that checklists are even more effective when physicians are prompted by a colleague to take action on information gathered using the quality improvement tool.

A study of 265 critical care patients at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago found that intensivists who relied on checklists alone did not reduce mortality rates. However, the death rate was cut in half when the checklist was accompanied by residents who asked the attending physicians how to act on information related to matters such as antibiotic prescribing, ventilator use and central-line placement.

Read the whole shebang.

My lede:

The Joint Commission in June cited early progress on a pilot project designed to identify and prevent the problems that can lead to wrong-site and wrong-patient surgeries.

The organizations participating in the project, including La Veta Surgical Center in Orange, Calif., and Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals in Philadelphia, were able to reduce the proportion of surgical cases in which there was a process-related defect that could result in a wrong procedure. That proportion was reduced from a baseline of 52% to 19%.

Read the whole shebang.

When killer tornadoes struck Missouri and Alabama in the spring, doctors often worked in chaotic conditions to save severely injured patients.

Read the whole shebang.

My lede:

Some stressed-out physicians are seeking the seeming safety of anonymity to blog and tweet about the travails of their lives in medicine. The results can be funny, provocative and revealing, but to some eyes these anonymous accounts veer from physician professionalism.

Read the whole shebang.

My lede:

More than 116 million Americans struggle with chronic pain each year, and associated medical charges and lost productivity cost the nation as much as $635 billion annually.

These are the findings of “Relieving Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education and Research,” a July report by an Institute of Medicine panel that calls for an aggressive national strategy to combat the problem.

Read the whole shebang.