RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2021
Six original research articles, with topics ranging from hospital admissions to weight control, serve as the foundation pieces for the just-published spring issue of the Ochsner Journal . Clinicians at Baylor Scott & White determined that the use of web-based patient portals increased readmissions in patients with atrial fibrillation. In another admissions-related study, researchers in Iowa evaluated COPD patients seen in the emergency department and discovered that documented anxiety and/or depression was one of the variables positively associated with admission. For patients who are in the hospital, Ochsner physicians reported a remarkable decrease in the incidence of traumatic Foley catheterizations after implementing a nurse-driven protocol for catheter use. And in a multi-institutional collaboration, clinicians examined appendectomy hospital stays in obese adults and children vs nonobese populations and found no differences between the groups. On the clinical side, orthopedists in Indonesia detail their efforts to create an Indonesian-language version of a commonly used knee injury assessment, and researchers at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge report their findings from a series of focus groups that assessed adults’ and children’s opinions about the components they’d like to see in a family-based weight management program.
The spring issue includes a special editorial dedicated to the memory of Dr. Ed Frohlich that details a strategy for successfully helping hospitalized patients quit smoking, while the 13 other articles in the issue promise many more discoveries and interesting reading.
The Ochsner Journal is published quarterly. To subscribe to the electronic table of contents and receive notification when new issues are published, click to the alerts page at the Journal website and enter your email address.
