diagnosis Tag

10 Jul

Posted at 17:13h in Radiology

Your doctor orders an MRI. You show up, lie still for a while, and leave. Then a few days later, your physician calls with results — but who actually read those images? It wasn't your doctor staring at scans in a back room. It was a radiologist, and the work they do is far more involved — and far more important — than most patients ever realize. Whether you're getting a routine X-ray or a complex brain scan in Austin, a radiologist is the medical expert quietly working behind the scenes to make sure your diagnosis is accurate.

Understanding the difference between imaging technologies is also useful for patients — explored in detail in this guide to MRI compared to a CT scan and what patients should know.

[caption id="attachment_74919" align="aligncenter" width="500"]what-does-a-radiologist-do Photo by Кайрат Сатдиков[/caption]

24 Oct

Posted at 21:31h in AHRQ, Author Interviews, Health Care Systems, Opiods
MedicalResearch.com Interview with: [caption id="attachment_37708" align="alignleft" width="150"]Anne Elixhauser, Ph.D. Senior Research Scientist Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Rockville MD 20857 Dr. Elixhauser[/caption] Anne Elixhauser, Ph.D. Senior Research Scientist Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Rockville MD 20857 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Hospital inpatient data began using ICD-10-CM (I-10) codes on October 1, 2015.  We have been doing analysis using the new codeset to determine to what extent we can follow trends crossing the ICD transition—do the trends look consistent when we switch from I-9 to I-10?  Tracking the opioid epidemic is a high priority so we made this one of our first detailed analyses.  We were surprised to find that hospital stays jumped 14% across the transition, compared to a 5% quarterly increase before the transition (under I-9) and a 3.5% quarterly increase after the transition (under I-10).  The largest increase (63.2%) was for adverse effects in therapeutic use (side effects of legal drugs), whereas stays involving opioid abuse decreased 21% and opioid poisoning (overdose) decreased 12.4%.