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• News: Hospital takes on septicemia, saves 36 lives

  Around Opelika, AL, a city of about 26,000 and an hour's drive from Montgomery, 36 people are alive today who otherwise would have died after receiving suboptimal care at East Alabama Medical Center.

  That's a harsh admission. But executives with the 314-bed hospital say they know this is true because three years ago, they joined a project with 156 other health systems to share quality data for comparison. The data revealed that patient mortality rates at EAMC were higher than expected, acknowledges hospital CEO Terry Andrus.

• Mentor Moment: Overweight physicians display bias in obesity care

  Doctors who are overweight or obese are less likely than physicians of normal weight to diagnose weight problems with their heavy patients or to launch discussions with them about their need to slim down, says a Johns Hopkins report authors say is the first of its kind.

• News: Spectrum Health targets ED frequent fliers for primary care

  A new program at Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids, MI is identifying "frequent fliers" at the system's emergency departments and placing those patients with a multi-specialist intervention team, according to a January 18 HealthLeaders Media article.

  The program, while only six weeks old, has steered more than 140 patients to the less-expensive coordinated care program and has saved the health system a net total of about $300,000.
   

• Mentor Moment: Giving every patient the Beyoncé experience

  The gossip mills have gone into overdrive since celebrity power couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z welcomed their daughter Blue Ivy into the world this month at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan.

  Much of the hype is standard fare among celebrity births—discussing the child’s unique name, guessing when photos will be released, and debating which weight-loss company the mother will sign with to lose the extra pregnancy pounds. But in Blue Ivy’s case, the media is also focusing on the allegedly lavish hospital suite in which she was born.
   

• News: Hospital develops program to combat nurse compassion fatigue

  Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis has launched a successful program aimed at reducing nurse burnout due to compassion fatigue, The Wall Street Journal recently reported.

  Compassion fatigue, a combination of secondary traumatic stress from witnessing the suffering of others and burnout, can affect a nurse’s ability to manage the emotional and physical stress of caring for acutely ill patients. As a result, some nurses avoid caring for these patients, leading to substandard care.
   

• Tip: Assess executive function prior to discharge

  Evaluating executive function, which relates directly to a patient’s decision-making capacity, is becoming increasingly important. Executive function refers to a patient’s physical abilities and mental capacities. During impaired executive function, instrumental activities of daily life (IADL) such as handling money, shopping, and medication management may exceed an individual’s capacity, even if memory impairment is mild.

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