The need continues for effective primary prevention programs among IDUs specifically targeting young persons who have recently started to inject drugs.

AimPatient-reported outcomes (PROs) have traditionally been implemented through a manual process of paper and pencil with little standardization throughout a Healthcare System. Each practice has asked patients specific questions to understand the patient’s health as it pertains to their specialty. These data were rarely shared and there has not been a comparison of patient’s health across different specialty domains. We sought to leverage interoperable electronic systems to provide a standardization of PRO assessments across sites of care.MethodsUniversity of Utah Health is comprised of four hospitals, 12 community clinics, over 400,000 unique annual patients, and more than 5000 providers. The enterprise wide implementation of PROs started in November of 2015. Patients can complete an assessment at home via email, or within the clinic on a tablet. Each specialty has the opportunity to add additional specialty-specific instruments. We customized the interval with which the patient answers the assessments based on specialty preference in order to minimize patient burden, while maximizing relevant data for clinicians.ResultsBarriers and facilitators were identified in three phases: Pre-implementation, Implementation, and Post-implementation. Each phase was further broken down into technical challenges, content inclusion and exclusion, and organizational strategy. These phases are unique and require collaboration between several groups throughout the organization with support from executive leadership.DiscussionWe are deploying system-wide standard and customized PRO collection with the goals of providing better patient care, improving physician-patient communication, and ultimately improving the value of the care given. Standardized assessment provides any clinician with information to quickly evaluate the overall, physical and mental health of a patient. This information is available real time to aid in patient communication for the clinician.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s41687-018-0059-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

BackgroundMany patients have serious depression that is nonresponsive to medications, but refuse electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Early research suggested that isoflurane anesthesia may be an effective alternative to ECT. Subsequent studies altered drug, dose or number of treatments, and failed to replicate this success, halting research on isoflurane's antidepressant effects for a decade. Our aim was to re-examine whether isoflurane has antidepressant effects comparable to ECT, with less adverse effects on cognition.MethodPatients with medication-refractory depression received an average of 10 treatments of bifrontal ECT (n = 20) or isoflurane (n = 8) over 3 weeks. Depression severity (Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression-24) and neurocognitive responses (anterograde and retrograde memory, processing speed and verbal fluency) were assessed at Pretreatment, Post all treatments and 4-week Follow-up.ResultsBoth treatments produced significant reductions in depression scores at Post-treatment and 4-week Follow-up; however, ECT had modestly better antidepressant effect at follow-up in severity-matched patients. Immediately Post-treatment, ECT (but not isoflurane) patients showed declines in memory, fluency, and processing speed. At Follow-up, only autobiographical memory remained below Pretreatment level for ECT patients, but isoflurane patients had greater test-retest neurocognitive score improvement.ConclusionsOur data reconfirm that isoflurane has an antidepressant effect approaching ECT with less adverse neurocognitive effects, and reinforce the need for a larger clinical trial.