Engineering Safe Healthcare: Why CDC Needs Business Partnerships

Author: Dr. Michael Bell Deputy Director, CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion Working at CDC, I see how our country is doing at protecting patients during medical care.  While we’ve made some solid progress, I am still shocked when we u…

What to tell patients when things go wrong (Part 2 of 2)

Author – Abbigail Tumpey, MPH CHES In my last blog, I discussed some of the emotions that patients may feel when they are notified that they were potentially exposed to an infectious disease during medical care – fear, anxiety, anger, loss of trust…

What to Tell Patients When Things Go Wrong (Part 1 of 2)

Author – Abbigail Tumpey, MPH CHES Imagine this – the phone rings, you hear a voice on the other end, “Hi, Mrs. Tumpey….I’m calling from Dr. Smith’s office.  You had medical care at our facility a couple of months ago.  We are calling to …

REDUCE MRSA: From Novel Idea to 74,000 Patients

Author – John Jernigan, M.D., director of CDC’s Office of Prevention Research and Evaluation and head of CDC’s Prevention Epicenters Program. I am excited to announce the results of the REDUCE MRSA study which evaluated three current strategies f…

Making Infection Prevention “Simple”

Susan Huang, M.D., M.P.H., lead author of the REDUCE MRSA study and Associate Professor at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine and Medical Director of Epidemiology and Infection Prevention at UC Irvine Health For years, we have searc…

What People Are Saying About the REDUCE MRSA Trial

The REDUCE MRSA trial was published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine and took place in two stages from 2009-2011. A multidisciplinary team from the University of California, Irvine, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, Hospital Corporatio…

Preserving Antibiotic Effectiveness: Everybody’s Responsibility

Guest Author – Ramanan Laxminarayan, PhD Director, Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy To many, antibiotic resistance may seem like an evergreen issue that reappears in the news cycle periodically. However, recent reports of the emergence and spread of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, described in CDC’s March 2013 Vital Signs Report remind us that we stand […]