Most scarcities that underpin health disparities within and among countries are not natural; rather, they result from policy choices and the operation of social institutions. Using examples from the United States of America: the Chicago heat wave and hurricane Katrina, this paper develops "denaturalizing scarcity" as a strategy for enquiry to inform public-health ethics in an interconnected wor...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study is to examine the attitudes of clinicians in a large HMO toward the effect of an outpatient Electronic Medical Record system on the quality of patient care. Attitudes toward a Results Reporting system and an online charting and ordering system are also compared. DESIGN A cross-sectional study was performed using a survey of Kaiser Permanente Northwest clini...

OBJECTIVE To understand clinicians' beliefs about practice variation and how variation might be reduced. METHODS We surveyed board-certified physicians (N = 178), nurse practitioners (N = 60), and physician assistants (N = 12) at an academic medical center and two community clinics, representing family medicine, general internal medicine, and cardiology, from February-April 2016. The Internet...

Acute complications of pregnancy can appear in all trimesters and pose challenges in diagnosis and management for the emergency physician. Life-threatening disorders, such as ectopic pregnancy in early pregnancy, pregnancy-induced hypertension in mid to late pregnancy, and abruptio placentae in late pregnancy, are relatively common. Clinicians must consider the signs and symptoms, stage of preg...

We present WESt, a visualization for surgery waiting times applied to the province of British Columbia (BC) in Canada. This project is motivated by the long waiting time for surgeries in BC, which has the potential to put patients in danger and put extra pressure on clinicians [2]. WESt helps patients select a hospital and a physician, and to explore their options to get their surgery as soon a...

The COPD Foundation Guide to COPD Diagnosis and Treatment is designed to provide practical advice for the health care provider. Available as a hard copy, online and as a mobile device application (app), the Guide serves as an accessible tool for clinicians. To date, over 400,000 cards have been distributed to health care providers nationwide at no charge. The Guide is updated as necessary and s...

The doctors of centuries past were pure clinicians, and therefore keen observers. They left us descriptions of many pathologies we are now "rediscovering". At the end of the Enlightenment in 1786, a French physician by the name of Edmé Chauvot de Beauchêne published a case of recurrent episodes of hypersomnia associated with disordered eating. Does he offer the oldest currently identified obser...

Duringthepast fewdecades,significantbiomedicaladvances have increased diagnostic and treatment effectiveness.Recentresearchfrompsychologyprovidesaspecialopportunitytoaddvaluetothetraditionalcornerstone ofmedicine: the patient-clinician relationship. What is it about the conversation between patient and physician that gives it therapeutic value? At the most basic level, physicians and other clin...

Siamese or conjoined twins have intrigued both the physician and layperson for centuries. The craniopagus type (joined at the head) is exceedingly rare, with an incidence of one in 2.5 million births. Most clinicians never see a case of craniopagus, and those who do rarely see more than one. The authors present a case of the craniopagus type of conjoined twins born and recently separated in Bri...

Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) eliminates illegible handwriting, reduces medical errors, and improves patient care. The administration, medical staff, nursing, and health information systems departments of a community teaching hospital cooperated to achieve organization-wide use of its CPOE system.