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The American Medical Association (AMA) has  launched  a collaborative of healthcare industry stakeholders to create a "common data model." Called the Integrated Health Model Initiative (IHMI), the program is intended to make it easier to pull together a wide variety of patient data in a structured format and exchange it among electronic health records (EHRs) from different companies. Participation in IHMI is open to all healthcare and technology stakeholders. Early collaborators include IBM, Cerner, Intermountain Healthcare, the American Heart Association, and the American Medical Informatics Association, among others. The participants will interact in an online platform hosted by the AMA. "We spend more than three trillion dollars a year on health care in America and generate more health data than ever before. Yet some of the most meaningful data — data to unlock potential improvements in patient outcomes — is fragmented, inaccessible or incomplete," said AMA

The recent mass shooting in Las Vegas was the largest in modern US history, with 58 people dead and more than 500 injured. This horrific event has once again highlighted gun violence and ignited a debate about whether physicians should wade into the national discussion on gun control. On the one hand, a group of editors, publishing in the  Annals of Internal Medicine ,  JAMA , the  New England Journal of Medicine , and  PLOS Medicine ,  shared a list of ways  in which healthcare professionals can use their skills and voices to address gun violence as a public health threat.    On the other hand, a suggestion in a  recent Medscape essay  suggesting that physicians should not own guns drew more than 300 hostile comments from Medscape readers, many of them angrily stressing that gun ownership is a Second Amendment right. Question 1 of 5 Do you believe gun violence is a public health threat? Yes No Unsure Question 2 of 5 Have you ever discussed gun sa

HYATTSVILLE, MD — Only about 48% of adults with hypertension had it under control during 2015–2016, according to data released today by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) [ 1 ] . "This finding that just under half of adults with hypertension have their BP under control is consistent with estimates since 2010," first author Cheryl Fryar, NCHS Division of Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, told  theheart.org | Medscape Cardiology . "However, this statistic shows that we have yet to meet the Healthy People 2020 goal of 61.2% for hypertension control." The report also shows that hypertension is more prevalent in US non-Hispanic black adults than in other race/ethnic-origin groups. Hypertension raises the risk of cardiovascular disease and "remains an important public-health challenge" in the US. Effective control of elevated blood pressure has been shown to reduce stroke, MI,

SAN DIEGO — Patients with a history of head injury show significant increases in amyloid deposition in key parts of the brain, including the frontal cortex, a finding that further supports evidence linking head injury with dementia later in life. "Our study found associations between prior head injury and increased amyloid deposition both globally and within the frontal cortex, including orbitofrontal, prefrontal, and superior frontal cortices," Andrea Schneider, MD, PhD, from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, told  Medscape Medical News. "Our findings suggest that the frontal cortex may be particularly susceptible to the damaging effects of head injury." The findings were presented here at the ANA 2017: 48th Annual Meeting of the American Neurological Association. Head injury has been linked to dementia in previous epidemiologic studies, and while the mechanisms are not well understood, amyloid and tau depositions are speculated to be likel

Transfusions from females who have been pregnant to males, especially those younger than 50 years, may be associated with increased risk for all-cause mortality, compared with such transfusions to females or with transfusions from women who have never been pregnant to recipients of either sex, according to a study  published online  on October 17 in  JAMA. Since 2011, several studies have suggested that blood transfusions from women are riskier for recipients than are transfusions from men, and that that risk is greatest from women who have been pregnant. The most common cause of transfusion-related mortality, acute lung injury, is associated with use of plasma-rich products, suggesting an antibody-mediated immune response. To further examine these associations, Camila Caram-Deelder, a PhD student in the Department of Transfusion Medicine at Sanquin Research, Leiden, the Netherlands, and coworkers analyzed the association between red blood cell transfusion from female blood donor

Palliative care and pain relief continue to remain neglected elements of global healthcare, according to a major new article  published online  October 13 in the  Lancet. The report is the first to provide a worldwide estimate of the extent of serious suffering related to illness and injury and the resultant need for palliative care and pain relief. More than 25.5 million people die every year without adequate relief for serious physical and psychological suffering ― nearly half of all deaths reported in 2015. The report also states that an additional 35.5 million people require pain relief for reasons other than end-of-life care. The vast majority of these patients (>80%) live in low- and middle-income countries, where access to immediate-release morphine, an essential and inexpensive drug to relieve pain, is severely lacking. Writing in a  linked commentary , Richard Horton, MD, editor-in-chief of the  Lancet , notes, "Death and disability are important metrics fo

Smoking, pulmonary hypertension, and a decline in lung function are associated with an increased risk of death in people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Now researchers in Spain have added another potential risk factor: the presence and severity of bronchiectasis. Compared with unaffected patients with COPD, patients with bronchiectasis had more than double the risk of dying than those without, according to a prospective, observational study published online February 8 in the  American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine . Miguel Angel Martínez-García, MD, from the Pneumology Service at the University and Polytechnic La Fe Hospital in Valencia, Spain, and colleagues assessed 201 participants with moderate to severe COPD from a consecutive series of outpatients diagnosed at 1 of 2 specialty clinics in Spain. The mean age of participants was 70 years, and 91% were men. A majority (77%) featured radiologic signs of emphysema. Patients were diagnosed