Word: patient
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...Another, subtler problem can be the difference between what are known as surrogate outcomes and patient outcomes. A new drug or treatment may reliably lower cholesterol, say, or reduce the size of a tumor - these are surrogate outcomes - and the drug-maker would call that a success. But the ultimate goal of treatment isn't simply to give you lab results you can boast about, it's to make you feel better and live longer; those are the patient outcomes. Sometimes though, good surrogate outcomes don't lead to good patient outcomes. Hormone replacement therapy, for example, raises good cholesterol...
...trials, the studies may be designed to yield the sunniest results possible. Allowing a new drug to shadow-box against a placebo, for instance, promises more marketable results than pitting it against a competing drug that's already on the market. Publicizing only surrogate outcomes without mentioning whether the patient benefits in any substantive way is another common drug company dodge. So is burying - or at least minimizing - side effects or other shortcomings...
Prescription pads, clipboards and patient charts are so 20th century. In the era of CT scans, gene-splicing and stem-cell breakthroughs, handwritten record-keeping feels about as outmoded as the fluoroscope. It's more than just strangely retro; it's fantastically expensive...
...paperwork alone could save an estimated $300 billion each year, according to the national coordinator for health information technology under former President George W. Bush. The consensus, of course, is that we must go paperless: link hospitals, doctors' offices and clinics via an interactive digital grid that allows patient histories, test results and other data to be called up at a keystroke and transmitted anywhere. Hospitals have been slowly converting to electronic health records (EHR) for several years, but with health-care reform, at last, high on Washington's to-do list, President Barack Obama has called for $19 billion...
...researchers found that every sample from a patient with ARVC had less plakoglobin and that in other types of heart disease plakoglobin was normal...