Background: Self-reflection is an essential tool to foster professional and personal development during medical training. The inpatient setting presents specific challenges to developing physicians, as housestaff grapple to negotiate death and dying, difficult patient interactions, [...]
Background: Medicare patients account for over 50% of hospital days at a cost of over $1 trillion per year. Yet, hospitalization of older adults often results in poor outcomes. Furthermore, the number of geriatric healthcare [...]
Background: Multiple recent studies have demonstrated a link between effective clinician communication and patient experience of care in the hospital. Additionally, at a time of unprecedented rates of clinician burnout, communication challenges can negatively impact [...]
Background: We are a large academic Hospital Medicine Group comprised of over 100 hospitalists at two tertiary care hospitals in an urban-suburban setting. Our group serves as the inpatient attendings for a large internal medicine [...]
Background: High quality discharges improve patients’ health outcomes and experience and are a vital component of resident education. Our internal medicine residency program has had challenges in sustaining our efforts to improve discharge planning and [...]
Background: The Hospitalist Division at Washington University in St. Louis provides coverage for multiple different services at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. At the present time, there are a total of 68 MDs and 6 NPs caring for [...]
Background: As many other hospitals of its size, our tertiary academic care center frequently operates at greater than 100% capacity. Medical admissions boarding in the Emergency Department (ED) while awaiting inpatient beds represent a bottleneck [...]
Background: Paracentesis is a commonly performed bedside procedure in hospitalized patients. It is often necessary for patients who are taking anticoagulant therapies and/or have disorders of hemostasis. Concerns about bleeding complications often lead to care [...]
Background: The high volume of handoffs between the Emergency Department (ED) team and the inpatient team on a daily basis makes this a ripe area for care improvement. Effective, safe and organized transitions facilitate high [...]
Background: Medication alerts are one of the touted safety features with the electronic health record (EHR). With time, users tend to override the alerts, which leads to patient harm. The phenomenon of “alert fatigue” is [...]
Background: Hospitalists today are tasked with maintaining quality care while also lowering health care costs. Length of stay and excess day reduction are surrogate markers of the efficiency of a hospitalist group by measuring lower [...]
Background: There is no consensus on the management of asymptomatic inpatient hypertension. This is alarming as the prevalence of inpatient hypertension may be as high as 72%. Hypertension treatment guidelines focus on chronic hypertension in [...]
Background: The process by which medical residents apply for subspecialty fellowship is a rigorous one that often involves multiple interviews per day. Data regarding the preparedness of residents who go through the interview process is [...]
Background: Inpatient physicians often spend 30-60 minutes daily creating a “rounding list,” a process that requires reviewing the electronic health record (EHR) and transcribing data to paper. Previous studies have described automated rounding-lists leveraging EHR [...]
Background: CSD’s are an integral component of the inpatient admission process. However, despite their importance, CSD’s are not performed during all admissions. Residents physicians, who are at the forefront of the admission process, are rarely [...]