Health and Medicine

Slow diffusion of patient-managed electronic health information record technologies, or PHRs, has limited the development of an interoperable health information infrastructure that will greatly improve health-care quality and cost and will save lives. For this reason, increasing PHR diffusion has been called a top priority by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Medication errors are one of the most serious problems occurring in doctor's offices and out-patient clinics, and older persons with chronic conditions are the most vulnerable. An experimental information technology (IT) intervention designed to help reduce such errors, developed by Gurdev Singh, Ph.D., director of the Patient Safety Research Center at the University at Buffalo, will begin this spring in eight ambulatory medical offices throughout Western New York.

Endocrinologists at the University at Buffalo have shown that eating a high-fat, high-carbohydrate meal increases the already high heart-attack risk for individuals who are obese.

New research by neurologists at the University at Buffalo has shown that a technique called optical coherence tomography, a simple and inexpensive measure employed currently to assess glaucoma, also could be used as a surrogate marker of disease status in multiple sclerosis (MS) and to assess the effectiveness of new and current MS treatments.

A $690,500 grant from the John R. Oishei Foundation will support the research of two professors in the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences focusing on Staphylococcus aureus Bacteremia.

Research carried out with a paintbrush bristle, a metronome, smelly chemicals and thousands of microscopic worms called nematodes may reveal important information about human aging diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Economic analysis suggests that healthy young donors in economies like that in the U.S. that place them at low-risk for post-surgical death would sell a kidney or a portion of a liver at prices that would drastically increase the number of those organs available for transplant and increase transplant cost by only 12 percent.

Orchard Park resident Susanne Kelley has been named "Protege of the Year" by the Allstate Minority and Women Emerging Entrepreneurs Program, a joint venture by the University at Buffalo School of Management's Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (CEL) and the UB Center for Urban Studies.

Police officers hold the second most stressful job (inner-city high school teacher is first), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This comes as no surprise to the University at Buffalo's John Violanti, a former member of the New York State Police and principal investigator on a pilot study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in police officers.

A discovery by University at Buffalo biologists that may explain the evolution of a lethal toxin is providing new information that could lead to more effective treatments for humans who fall victim to it.