Drug prescription appropriateness in the elderly: an Italian study.

PURPOSE: Correct drug prescription in the elderly is a difficult task that requires careful survey of the current pharmacological therapies. In this article, we reviewed the drug prescriptions provided to 860 persons aged 65 years or over, residing in a small city of Lombardy, Italy. METHODS: Subjects were recruited from a local nursing home, the Pavia and Vigevano Neuropsychological Center for Alzheimer's Disease, general practitioners' offices, and the local University of the Third Age. For each patient, the amount of potentially inappropriate prescriptions (PIPs), sedative and anticholinergic load (SL and AL, respectively), and drug-drug interactions were evaluated. RESULTS: Widespread polypharmacy, giving rise to 10.06% of PIPs in the whole collection of prescriptions, was observed. In particular, PIPs mainly concern drugs acting at the central nervous system level, mostly benzodiazepines and antipsychotics. Moreover, approximately one-fourth of the subjects had an elevated SL and approximately one-tenth a high AL. Drug-drug interactions were frequent (266 requiring medical attention), up to five for each single patient. Of concern was the underuse of antidementia drugs: only 20 patients received a cholinesterase inhibitor or memantine, although 183 patients were potentially suitable for this treatment. CONCLUSION: These results demonstrate the need to develop novel strategies aimed at improving the quality of drug prescription.

A refinement of Hong's technique for the removal of stuck dialysis catheters: an easy solution to a complex problem.

AIM: A long-term tunneled hemodialysis catheter can be difficult or impossible to pull out if a fibrin sleeve has attached it to the venous wall. We report the outcome of a refinement of Hong's technique for removing incarcerated catheters aimed at improving its feasibility and safety. METHODS: We applied a modification of Hong's technique in four patients (two males, age ranging from 51 to 68 years) with jugular twin hemodialysis catheters (five of eight lines incarcerated). Hong pioneered the technique of endoballooning to expand a stuck central venous catheter, thus freeing it from adhesions. In our technical refinement, we cut the catheter close to its venous entry point in order to facilitate pullout and inserted a valved introducer as access for guide wires as well as for inflations of the catheter balloon. A stiff guide wire was placed in the inferior vena cava to avoid potential damage to heart cavities. Dilation was monitored under fluoroscopy with constrictions showing points where the catheter was incarcerated. If adhesions persisted through the same introducer, endoluminal dilations were repeated with a larger diameter balloon until the catheter was released. New catheters can be positioned using the stiff guide wire already in place. All removals were carried out under local anesthesia in an angiographic room by interventional radiologists. RESULTS: All catheters were successfully removed without complications. Average fluoroscopy time for removal was 12 minutes. In the case of a Tesio catheter removed after 12 years because of infection, a computed tomography scan 2 months later revealed persistence of a calcified fibrin sleeve in the vessel. CONCLUSIONS: Hong's technique was confirmed to be a simple, safe and highly effective way to remove incarcerated long-term central venous catheters. The refinements we adopted made the procedure more flexible and possibly less prone to complications. By properly using ordinary tools available anywhere, Hong's technique could be considered Columbus' egg in this previously risky field.

Implementation of an automated system for monitoring adherence to hemodialysis treatment: a report of seven years of experience.

OBJECTIVE: In this paper we present the clinical deployment and evaluation of a computerized system, EMOSTAT, aimed at improving the quality of hemodialysis sessions. EMOSTAT automatically imports data from the hemodialysis monitoring software tools and analyzes the delivered treatment looking at six clinically relevant parameters. Failures-to-adhere (FtAs) to the planned treatment are detected and reported to the care-givers. METHODS: EMOSTAT has been used for more than seven years in the management of a dialysis service located in Mede, Italy. A total of 72 patients were monitored and 21251 dialyses were collected. Data analysis is performed on the periods 2002-2005 and 2005-2008, corresponding to two different software releases. RESULTS: The system had been exploited into everyday clinical practice for the entire considered period. The number of FtAs significantly decreased along the first period: the bulk blood flow FtAs decreased after the introduction of the system. Hemodialysis sessions lasted longer in the second period. Co-occurring FtAs, highlighting the presence of complex FtAs patterns, were also detected. CONCLUSIONS: EMOSTAT provides an effective way to re-focus the attention of the dialysis department on the treatment plan and on its implementation. The automatic data collection and the design philosophy of EMOSTAT allowed the routine use of the system.

Automatic adaptive system dialysis for hemodialysis-associated hypotension and intolerance: a noncontrolled multicenter trial.

BACKGROUND: Hemodialysis is complicated by a high incidence of intradialytic hypotension and disequilibrium symptoms caused by hypovolemia and a decrease in extracellular osmolarity. Automatic adaptive system dialysis (AASD) is a proprietary dialysis system that provides automated elaboration of dialysate and ultrafiltration profiles based on the prescribed decrease in body weight and sodium content. STUDY DESIGN: A noncontrolled (single arm), multicenter, prospective, clinical trial. SETTING & PARTICIPANTS: 55 patients with intradialytic hypotension or disequilibrium syndrome in 15 dialysis units were studied over a 1-month interval using standard treatment (642 sessions) followed by 6 months using AASD (2,376 sessions). INTERVENTION: AASD (bicarbonate dialysis with dialysate sodium concentration and ultrafiltration rate profiles determined by the automated procedure). OUTCOMES: Primary and major secondary outcomes were the frequency of intradialytic hypotension and symptoms (hypotensive events, headache, nausea, vomiting, and cramps), respectively. RESULTS: More stable intradialytic systolic and diastolic blood pressures with lower heart rate were found using AASD compared with standard treatment. Sessions complicated by hypotension decreased from 58.7% ± 7.3% to 0.9% ± 0.6% (P < 0.001). The incidence of other disequilibrium syndrome symptoms was lower in patients receiving AASD. There were no differences in end-session body weight, interdialytic weight gain, or presession natremia between the standard and AASD treatment periods. LIMITATIONS: A noncontrolled (single arm) study, no crossover from AASD to standard treatment. CONCLUSIONS: This study shows the long-term clinical efficacy of AASD for intradialytic hypotension and disequilibrium symptoms in a large number of patients and dialysis sessions.

Building a normative decision support system for clinical and operational risk management in hemodialysis.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a decision support system for risk management in hemodialysis (HD) departments. The proposed system exploits a domain ontology to formalize the problem as a Bayesian network. It also relies on a software tool, able to automatically collect HD data, to learn the network conditional probabilities. By merging prior knowledge and the available data, the system allows to estimate risk profiles both for patients and HD departments. The risk management process is completed by an influence diagram that enables scenario analysis to choose the optimal decisions that mitigate a patient's risk. The methods and design of the decision support tool are described in detail, and the derived decision model is presented. Examples and case studies are also shown. The tool is one of the few examples of normative system explicitly conceived to manage operational and clinical risks in health care environments.

Burnout in health care providers of dialysis service in Northern Italy--a multicentre study.

BACKGROUND: Few data are available regarding the prevalence of burnout among dialysis health care workers. Aims of the present study were to assess and compare burnout levels in a sample of nurses and physicians working in dialysis units, and to investigate their relationships with quality of life, in a cross-sectional observational study. METHODS: A total of 344 workers from 10 dialysis centres in Northern Italy completed a battery of questionnaires including the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the MOS-36 Item Short Form Health Survey [SF36: physical (PCS) and mental (MCS) component scores] and the 30-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ30). Data on social and demographic characteristics and working conditions were also collected. General Estimating Equations models were used for the analysis. RESULTS: Overall, burnout scores were lower than the Italian normative sample, with no significant differences between physicians and nurses. However, 30% of nurses had high emotional exhaustion vs 18% of physicians (adjusted OR 2.38, P = 0.003). Emotional exhaustion was also predicted by number of worked hours and months worked in dialysis in the previous 2 years. Depersonalisation was predicted by male gender and bad relationship with coworkers. Having no children and having a permanent hospital position predicted low personal accomplishment. PCS was lower in nurses (50.0 vs 53.3, P < 0.001), while no significant difference was found for MCS and GHQ30. Lower PCS was associated with emotional exhaustion (P = 0.007) and GHQ30 > 5 with depersonalization (P = 0.032). CONCLUSIONS: Although burnout is not a general problem in dialysis health care providers, a subgroup of them may be identified, who would benefit from supportive measures to prevent this condition. Nurses appeared more burned-out in the emotional exhaustion scale than physicians.

Case-based retrieval to support the treatment of end stage renal failure patients.

OBJECTIVE: In the present paper, we describe an application of case-based retrieval to the domain of end stage renal failure patients, treated with hemodialysis. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Defining a dialysis session as a case, retrieval of past similar cases has to operate both on static and on dynamic features, since most of the monitoring variables of a dialysis session are time series. Retrieval is then articulated as a two-step procedure: (1) classification, based on static features and (2) intra-class retrieval, in which dynamic features are considered. As regards step (2), we concentrate on a classical dimensionality reduction technique for time series allowing for efficient indexing, namely discrete Fourier transform (DFT). Thanks to specific index structures (i.e. k -d trees), range queries (on local feature similarity) can be efficiently performed on our case base, allowing the physician to examine the most similar stored dialysis sessions with respect to the current one. RESULTS: The retrieval tool has been positively tested on real patients' data, coming from the nephrology and dialysis unit of the Vigevano hospital, in Italy. CONCLUSIONS: The overall system can be seen as a means for supporting quality assessment of the hemodialysis service, providing a useful input from the knowledge management perspective.

Temporal data mining for the quality assessment of hemodialysis services.

OBJECTIVE: This paper describes the temporal data mining aspects of a research project that deals with the definition of methods and tools for the assessment of the clinical performance of hemodialysis (HD) services, on the basis of the time series automatically collected during hemodialysis sessions. METHODS: Intelligent data analysis and temporal data mining techniques are applied to gain insight and to discover knowledge on the causes of unsatisfactory clinical results. In particular, two new methods for association rule discovery and temporal rule discovery are applied to the time series. Such methods exploit several pre-processing techniques, comprising data reduction, multi-scale filtering and temporal abstractions. RESULTS: We have analyzed the data of more than 5800 dialysis sessions coming from 43 different patients monitored for 19 months. The qualitative rules associating the outcome parameters and the measured variables were examined by the domain experts, which were able to distinguish between rules confirming available background knowledge and unexpected but plausible rules. CONCLUSION: The new methods proposed in the paper are suitable tools for knowledge discovery in clinical time series. Their use in the context of an auditing system for dialysis management helped clinicians to improve their understanding of the patients' behavior.