Likewise, hospital readmission rates among patients seen by the diabetes team fell from 25% to 14.3% over the study period. Readmission rates did not change among those who did not receive care from the team.

Such team-based care, says Zilbermint, is efficient. “Patients don’t have to wait a day or two in the hospital to consult with an endocrinologist,” he says. “With a team like ours, we’re based in the hospital and ready to care for patients more quickly than traditional models of bringing in endocrinologists from the community to consult with patients.”


Zilbermint estimates that a 27% reduction in the length of stay could account for nearly $1 million in potential health care savings.

Abstract: Retrospective Study of Inpatient Diabetes Management Service, Length of Stay and 30-day Readmission Rate of Patients with Diabetes at a Community Hospital

Journal publication: DOI: 10.1080/20009666.2019.1593782


DOES THE ‘WHOOSH’ YOU HEAR WITH THE STETHOSCOPE MEAN THERE IS A HEART PROBLEM?

In a feasibility study, Johns Hopkins experts are testing an app that uses artificial intelligence paired with an electronic stethoscope to cut down on unnecessary referrals of children to cardiologists for the evaluation of heart murmurs.

Up to 70% of children have an occasional, innocent heart murmur, the turbulence that happens when blood flows through the heart. It can be difficult for primary care providers and pediatricians to decipher whether the whooshing sound they hear with a stethoscope is normal variability of blood flow through the heart or if there is a real problem that needs to be evaluated by a cardiologist, says Reid Thompson, M.D., associate professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Typically, only about one-third of children referred to cardiologists because of a murmur need to be followed by specialists, says Thompson. Unnecessary referrals waste parents’ time, increase health care spending and may leave parents with a lasting worry that their child has a heart problem. “We wanted to develop a new way to reduce the number of children that have no heart disease being referred to cardiologists,” explains Thompson.

With graduate student Christine Lucille Kuryla, Thompson developed a pilot study to give health care practitioners in primary care offices an electronic stethoscope that records heart noises, which are uploaded to a smartphone with an app that uses artificial intelligence to evaluate the recording. The recordings are also uploaded to a cloud-computing system and evaluated by a pediatric cardiologist.

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