New Syphilis Tools App
Frontline clinicians are likely finding that diagnosing syphilis can be challenging — limited time, competing priorities, and complex diagnostics make it hard to act confidently and quickly. That is exactly why CDC funded this project and partnership with the University of Washington. Syphilis Tools is a new, free app that healthcare providers can use as a clinical reference for syphilis screening, testing, and treatment. Urgent Care Clinical Implications: Clinician can use interactive tools within the app to interpret serologic tests, identify syphilis stages, determine treatment regimens, and monitor titers, all from one app. Full Access: CDC
24 AI tools ranked for patient safety: Stanford, Harvard study
Stanford and Harvard researchers benchmarked 24 AI systems (20 generalist LLMs and 4 retrieval-augmented clinical tools) on 1,100 real physician-to-specialist consult cases, scored by 29 board-certified physicians. The four medical-specific tools (AMBOSS LiSA, Doximity Ask, OpenEvidence, Glass Health) tied for best, with potentially severe harmful errors in 2.9-5.4% of cases, versus roughly 9-25% for the generalist models. More than 80% of severe errors were omissions (recommending too little) rather than harmful actions. Urgent Care implications: Clinical decision support in Urgent Care should favor evidence-grounded, medical-specific tools over general chatbots, and since omission is the dominant failure mode, clinicians should use AI to check for missed workup, follow-up, and referral steps rather than as a sole answer. AI should be used carefully and should not replace evidence-based recommendations. Full Access: Becker Hospital Review
Consistency Key to Managing Pediatric Constipation
At AAP 2026, pediatric GI specialist, argued that managing pediatric constipation depends on consistency. Treatment starts with an effective disimpaction (oral PEG or magnesium citrate, sometimes with a stimulant laxative, often done at home). Otherwise, softener alone can cause leakage around retained stool, and families wrongly conclude it isn’t working. Maintenance therapy then aims for a soft stool daily, paired with scheduled toilet sits, foot-stool positioning, and rewards for behaviors the child controls, such as taking medication and sitting. Recovery can take months to years, so written green/yellow/red action plans and school bathroom accommodations help prevent relapse. Urgent Care Clinical Implications: Urgent Care visits often catch children at the impaction or overflow-soiling stage, so offering a home cleanout plan and clear counseling that fiber or a short softener course alone won’t fix it can prevent repeat visits. Give a written action plan and arrange prompt PCP follow-up to carry the maintenance phase. Full Access: Contemporary Pediatrics
Post-Treatment Vaginal Microbiota Predicts Bacterial Vaginosis Recurrence in Concurrently Treated Couples
This post-hoc pooled analysis gave women standard 7-day oral metronidazole and their male partners oral metronidazole plus topical 2% clindamycin. Repeat BV at 4 weeks was 20.7%, well below the 46% in the untreated-partner control arm of the StepUp trial. Women whose Nugent score was still 4-10 on day 8, before resuming sex, had about 2.8 times the risk of repeat BV (about 35% vs 12%). IUD users trended toward higher risk. The authors conclude that re-infection and persistence of BV-associated organisms are distinct, overlapping pathways, and that partner treatment only addresses the first. Urgent Care Clinical Implications: For recurrent BV, partner treatment will not fix persistence, so repeating the same regimen in a woman who never cleared is likely to fail, and a short-interval recheck before resuming sex may identify those women. Full Access: The Lancet