Top Ten Tips Palliative Care Clinicians Should Know About Leveraging the Electronic Health Record for Data Collection and Quality Improvement.

As palliative care (PC) programs rapidly grow and expand across settings, the need to measure, improve, and standardize high-quality PC has also grown. The electronic health record (EHR) is a key component of these efforts as a central hub of care delivery and a repository of patient and system data. Deliberate efforts to leverage the EHR for PC quality improvement (QI) can help PC programs and health systems improve care for patients with serious illnesses. This article, written by clinicians with experience in QI, informatics, and clinical program development, provides practical tips and guidance on EHR strategies and tools for QI and quality measurement.

Perioperative cardiac evaluation: novel interventions and clinical challenges.

Cardiac complications are one of the most important sources of morbidity and mortality after noncardiac surgery. In this review, we discuss the pathophysiology of postoperative cardiac complications and published risk indices and guidelines that allow an estimation of preoperative risk. Recent evidence has challenged the primary role of perioperative beta blockers as a risk reduction strategy. The highest level of evidence for their use is for patients with coronary artery disease or multiple risk factors undergoing vascular surgery. Beta blockers may provide no benefit or may be potentially harmful for low- and intermediate-risk patients and surgeries. For patients with contraindications to beta blockers, diltiazem and clonidine are alternative agents that reduce cardiac risk. Statins are emerging as another potential strategy to reduce cardiac risk, although the evidence is based primarily on retrospective analyses. Coronary artery revascularization does not reduce cardiac complications after noncardiac surgery among patients with stable coronary artery disease.