EVERY WEEK, TWO million people across the world will sit for hours, hooked up to a whirring, blinking, blood-cleaning dialysis machine. Their alternatives: Find a kidney transplant or die. In the US, dialysis is a roughly 40-billion-dollar business keeping 468,000 people with end-stage renal disease alive. The process is far from perfect, but that hasn’t hindered…

Computer simulation addresses the problem of blood clotting Creating an artificial implantable kidney would be an epic advance in medicine and could address a chronic shortage of donor kidneys needed for transplant. Researchers have been at this quest for the past 15 years and keep coming upon one extremely knotty problem: how to keep the…

Combination of gender bias and professional culture keeps health care’s most trusted providers out of health news Jennifer Garrett was beginning to think she wasn’t very good at her job. As a content strategist for the School of Nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of her duties was to get nursing issues into news…

The U.S. is projected to experience a shortage of Registered Nurses (RNs) that is expected to intensify as Baby Boomers age and the need for health care grows. Compounding the problem is the fact that nursing schools across the country are struggling to expand capacity to meet the rising demand for care given the national…

By the Innovations Exchange Team The Innovations Exchange Team: You oversee projects to improve cultural and linguistic competence in hospitals. What are some of the biggest challenges faced by hospitals? Cindy Brach: Hospitals face many priorities, making it difficult for advocates to focus attention on cultural and linguistic competence. Right now, hospitals are focused on…