About 15% of hospitalized older adults will be readmitted within a month of discharge. However, a new University of Michigan study found that a disproportionately high number return for preexisting, or linked infections–infections presumably treated during the first hospital stay. Further, patients discharged home or to home care were more likely to return with a...
New research suggests that, under the United States’ Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), expanded Medicaid coverage has provided greater improvements in health insurance coverage for married people, especially women, than for unmarried people. Jim Stimpson of Drexel University, Pennsylvania, and colleagues present these findings in PLOS ONE. Medicaid is a U.S. government program...
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65546693/wjoel_180320_2353_healthcare_003.0.jpg "Widely Used Health Care Prediction Algorithm Found to Be Biased Against Blacks")
From predicting who will be a repeat offender to who’s the best candidate for a job, computer algorithms are now making complex decisions in lieu of humans. But increasingly, many of these algorithms are being found to replicate the same racial, socioeconomic or gender-based biases they were built to overcome. This racial bias extends to...
A breakthrough has been made in understanding a rare genetic skin disease that causes progressively enlarging skin tumours over the scalp, face and body. For the first time, scientists at Newcastle University, UK, have identified changes in the DNA of the tumour cells in those with CYLD cutaneous syndrome (CCS) that may help them grow....
Adding to what is known about the growing crisis of suicide among American teens, a team led by researchers at the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at New York University have uncovered several troubling trends during the period of 1991-2017, among Black high school students in particular. The findings are published in the...
Fresh evidence has revealed that major tobacco companies in the UK have made attempts to continue to market their products despite the introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes nearly three years ago. The plain packaging policy was designed to rid tobacco companies of their last remaining method for tobacco advertising. No branded packets could be...
Web-based and digital-app services that offer oral contraception appear to be overall safe and efficient, according to the findings of a secret-shopper-style study conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School and UC Davis that analyzed the birth control prescription services of nine U.S. vendors. The results, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, offer...
A web-based calculator that helps middle-aged women predict their risks of conditions that become more likely with age has been developed by public health, medical and computer science experts from throughout the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Led by physician John Robbins of UC Davis Health, the team’s risk-prediction calculator is unique in that it accounts...
For the last hundred years, scientists have believed that humans develop in a womb that remains sterile and completely isolated from the collection of bacteria, fungi and viruses that make us sick when we emerge into the outside world. This theory was largely based on the fact that it was very difficult to grow live...
In the wake of six deaths and 380 cases of confirmed and probable lung disease across the U.S., the Trump administration has called for banning most flavored e-cigarettes because of their huge appeal to young people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is looking closely at the different flavored nicotine juices and other substances...