What AHRQ Learned While Working to Transform Primary Care.

Building on previous efforts to transform primary care, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) launched EvidenceNOW: Advancing Heart Health in 2015. This 3-year initiative provided external quality improvement support to small and medium-size primary care practices to implement evidence-based cardiovascular care. Despite challenges, results from an independent national evaluation demonstrated that the EvidenceNOW model successfully boosted the capacity of primary care practices to improve quality of care, while helping to advance heart health. Reflecting on AHRQ's own learnings as the funder of this work, 3 key lessons emerged: (1) there will always be surprises that will require flexibility and real-time adaptation; (2) primary care transformation is about more than technology; and (3) it takes time and experience to improve care delivery and health outcomes. EvidenceNOW taught us that lasting practice transformation efforts need to be responsive to anticipated and unanticipated changes, relationship-oriented, and not tied to a specific disease or initiative. We believe these lessons argue for a national primary care extension service that provides ongoing support for practice transformation.

Long-term outcome of combined radiologic and surgical strategy for the management of biliary complications after pediatric liver transplantation.

OBJECTIVES: We aimed to analyze the risk factors for management failure of BC after pediatric liver transplantation (pLT) by retrospectively analyzing primary pLT performed between 1997 and 2018 (n = 620 patients). RESULTS: In all, 117/620 patients (19%) developed BC. The median (range) follow-up was 9 (1.4-21) years. Patient survival at 1, 5 and 10 years was 88.9%, 85.7%, 84.4% and liver graft survival was 82.4%, 77.4%, and 74.3% respectively. Graft not patient survival was impaired by BC (p = 0.01). Multivariate analysis identified the number of dilatation courses > 2 (p = 0.008), prolonged cold ischemia time (p = 0.004), anastomosed multiple biliary ducts (p = 0.019) and hepatic artery thrombosis (p = 0.01) as factors associated with impaired graft survival. The number of dilatation courses > 2 (p < 0.001) and intrahepatic vs anastomotic stricture (p = 0.014) were associated with management failure. Thus, repeated (> 2) radiologic dilatation courses are associated with impaired graft survival and management failure. Overall, graft but not patient survival was impaired by BC.

Hidden chiral symmetries in BDI multichannel Kitaev chains.

Realistic implementations of the Kitaev chain require, in general, the introduction of extra internal degrees of freedom. In the present work, we discuss the presence of hidden BDI symmetries for free Hamiltonians describing systems with an arbitrary number of internal degrees of freedom. We generalize results of a spinfull Kitaev chain to construct a Hamiltonian with n internal degrees of freedom and obtain the corresponding hidden chiral symmetry. As an explicit application of this generalized result, we exploit by analytical and numerical calculations the case of a spinful two-band Kitaev chain, which can host up to four Majorana bound states. We also observe the appearence of minigap states, when chiral symmetry is broken.