THURSDAY, May 22 (HealthDay News) -- The first national print advertising campaign focusing on the quality of care in American hospitals was launched this week by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The ads, which began appearing May 21 in 58 major daily newspapers, promote the department's Hospital Compare Web site, which is designed to help consumers make well-informed decisions when selecting a hospital.

The Web site offers information about 26 quality-of-care measures -- including quality of clinical care for specific procedures and what patients say about their experiences -- in almost 4,000 hospitals across the United States.

The newspaper ads, placed by the HHS' Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), provide scores from two of the 26 quality-of-care measures on Hospital Compare for a sample of hospitals in the newspapers' coverage areas.

In the ads, readers are invited to "Compare the Quality of Your Local Hospitals" and are provided with the following information:

• Percentage of patients at each hospital who always received help when they requested it, as reported by patients.
• Percentage of patients at each hospital who were given antibiotics one hour before surgery, as reported by hospitals.
• The state average for each of these two measures.

"The newspaper ads are designed to raise awareness about the important information on Hospital Compare. Patients and their family members can use this information to see how well their hospitals are providing care, and hospitals can use the data to focus on areas where there is opportunity to improve the quality of care," Kerry Weems, CMS acting administrator, said in a prepared statement.

Patient experience information available on Hospital Compare is collected through a new patient survey, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), the first national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patient opinions about the quality of their care.

The survey results included on Hospital Compare cover 10 main areas of patient experience, including how often doctors and nurses communicated well with patients, how often patients received help quickly, and patients' overall rating of hospitals.

More information

Here's where you can find Hospital Compare.

TUESDAY, May 20 (HealthDay News) -- Sleep deprivation can affect your ability to make sense of what you see, a study by neuroscience researchers at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore shows.

Using MRI to measure blood flow in the brains of volunteers, the researchers found that even after sleep deprivation, participants had periods of near-normal brain function in which they were able to complete tasks quickly. However, periods of slow response and severe declines in visual processing were mixed in with these periods of normalcy.

"Interestingly, the team found that a sleep-deprived brain can normally process simple visuals, like flashing checkerboards. But the 'higher visual areas' -- those that are responsible for making sense of what we see -- didn't function well. Herein lies the peril of sleep deprivation," study author Dr. Michael Chee, a professor of the neurobehavioral disorders program at Duke-NUS, said in a prepared statement.

During these slow visual responses, the volunteers showed significant reductions in their higher visual cortex activity. At the same time, their frontal and parietal "control regions" were less able to make their usual connections.

The mixture of sleep deprivation-related cognitive lapses and near normalcy demonstrate the competing effects of trying to remain awake while the brain is trying to power down for sleep, when it ordinarily becomes less responsive to sensory stimuli, Chee said.

The study, published in the May 21 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, has implications for the many people who work night shifts.

"The periods of apparently normal functioning could give a false sense of competency and security, when in fact, the brain's inconsistency could have dire consequences," Chee said.

"The study task appeared simple, but as we showed in previous work, you can't effectively memorize or process what you see if your brain isn't capturing that information," Chee noted. "The next step in our work is to see what we might do to improve things, besides just offering coffee, now that we have a better idea of where the weak links in the system are."

More information

The National Sleep Foundation has more about shift work and sleep  .

MONDAY, May 19 (HealthDay News) -- A new research program designed to help patients with mysterious health conditions that can't be diagnosed was announced Monday by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The Undiagnosed Diseases Program will study the most puzzling medical cases referred to the NIH Clinical Center by doctors across the United States. The goals are to improve disease management for individual patients and to advance general medical knowledge of these conditions.

The program will utilize existing facilities and staff at the NIH Clinical Center, the National Human Genome Research Institute, and the NIH Office of Rare Diseases.

"A small number of patients suffer from symptoms that do not correspond to known conditions, making their care and treatment extraordinarily difficult. However, the history of biomedical research has taught us that careful study of baffling cases can provide new insights into the mechanisms of disease -- both rare and common," NIH Director Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni said in a prepared statement.

Each patient enrolled in the program will be evaluated by more than 25 senior attending physicians at the NIH Clinical Center, the nation's clinical research hospital. The physicians' specialties include endocrinology, immunology, oncology, dermatology, dentistry, cardiology and genetics.

"We have developed a stringent referral process to ensure this program deals with those cases that have truly confounded medical experts. We will be very selective when it comes to patient eligibility. Our focus is strictly on conditions that have not been diagnosed," said program director Dr. William A. Gahl, who is clinical director at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

To be considered for the program, patients must be referred by a physician and provide all medical records and diagnostic tests requested by the NIH. The estimated 100 patients a year who meet the program's criteria will undergo additional evaluation (which may take up to a week) at the NIH Clinical Center.

In organizing the program, the NIH has contacted patient advocacy groups that provide information and support for people struggling with mysterious conditions.

"We hope to build upon our strong working relationships with many patient advocacy groups. These organizations provide a crucial link in our nation's efforts to improve health through biomedical research," Stephen Groft, director of the NIH Office of Rare Diseases, said in a prepared statement.

"We hope that this new partnership of NIH researchers, advocacy groups and patients will give hope for many Americans who now face troubling medical symptoms with no clear diagnosis," Groft said.

More information

Here's where you can find the Undiagnosed Diseases Program.

WEDNESDAY, April 16 (HealthDay News) -- Increasing patient control of health records could dramatically change how medical research is conducted, say Children's Hospital Boston researchers.

In a Sounding Board article in the April 17 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers noted that the shift to personally controlled health records (PCHRs) will give patients and doctors easier access to records during clinical care and will also have a major impact on the conduct of biomedical research.

With PCHRs, patients have Web-based access to almost all the information -- such as lab tests, diagnoses, medications and clinical notes -- in their medical records. They can decide who gets to see that information.

"Giving patients access and control over their medical records will unlock a whole new world where researchers will suddenly be able to recruit hundreds, thousands, possibly millions of patients from all over the world, and have access to new data sets and populations. Imagine the possibilities this will bring and the impact it will have on bringing research to the bedside," article co-author Dr. Isaac Kohane, of the hospital's informatics program, said in a prepared statement.

More than a decade ago, Kohane, colleague Dr. Kenneth Mandl and others on the informatics team at Boston Children's developed the first PCHR.

While PCHRs offer many benefits, there are some potential pitfalls.

"While this is exciting indeed, without forethought and regulation, the tremendous benefit of PCHRs -- for research and clinically -- could easily be overshadowed by problems that could arise from the unethical and uncontrolled use of a patient's valuable medical information," article co-author Dr. Kenneth Mandl said in a prepared statement.

"Who will have access to the data, for what purposes, and under what sort of regulation? Can patients sell their information? How will we establish and protect their identity? These are the kinds of questions -- among many others -- that we need to ask now and clarify before PCHRs become mainstream," Mandl said.

"While PCHRs may seem futuristic, they are here now and will be widely adopted in the not-so-distant future. Fortune 100 companies are already signing on to develop their own PCHRs for their employees. We cannot afford to be asleep at the wheel. Before they hit prime-time, we need to think about what is at stake and what has to happen -- including regulations and standards -- if PCHRs are to be used to the full extent of their potential," Kohane said.

More information

The U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality explains how you can keep track of your health care.