Background: Emergency room crowding has been proven to lead to poor outcomes (e.g., mortality) and has worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Novel clinics that work collaboratively with emergency departments (ED) to transfer lower acuity patients to receive care in ambulatory settings rather than the ED have emerged. Our innovative ED Surge program cares for these [...]

Background: Patient safety indicators (PSI) are hospital quality measures designed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to capture potentially-preventable adverse events. PSI-12 is defined as perioperative pulmonary embolism (PE) or deep vein thrombosis (DVT). It is unclear how active COVID-19 infection, which is known to be associated with coagulopathy, has impacted PSI-12 [...]

Background: The United States incarcerates more people than any other country (1) and there are gross inequities in who is incarcerated. Native Americans are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated as White Americans (2); Black Americans are incarcerated at a rates five times higher (3). People with lower incomes face higher incarceration rates, [...]

Background: Building a diverse hospitalist workforce is of paramount importance as a growing number of studies demonstrate the value of diverse teams on patient care (reference 1). A 2019 Association of American Medical Colleges report on race/ethnicity data of full-time academic medicine faculty showed that 3.6% self-identified as Black or African American, and 5.5% self-identified [...]

Background: Plastic waste contaminates all planetary ecosystems, impacting human and animal health. The United States is the largest generator of plastic waste in the world, and the healthcare industry produces a disproportionate amount due to a reliance on single-use products. The COVID-19 pandemic has seemingly led to a global increase in plastic waste, partially correlated [...]

Background: The diagnostic process is fraught with uncertainty and potential failures, which increases risk of diagnostic error (DE) during hospitalization. One way of improving awareness of DE involves the use of electronic health record (EHR) data to calculate and display risk of DE for individual patients. As a part of our AHRQ-funded Patient Safety Learning [...]

Background: Chest pain is a common chief complaint among adult patients presenting to emergency departments. An assessment of chest pain management at the institution noted significant variability in provider treatment patterns for chest pain. While a NSTE-ACS protocol existed, there was varied use and inconsistent adoption. Review of pre-intervention data demonstrated that some emergency medicine [...]

Case Presentation: 17 year old female presented with a 2-day history of acute-onset, worsening left leg numbness and weakness in the L1-L3 distribution. On the day of admission, she developed facial swelling with pink-pustular plaques over her face and scaly erythematous patches over her left shoulder and hand. Past medical history included major depressive disorder, [...]

Case Presentation: A 23 year-old man with history of classic maple syrup urine disease (MSUD) and obesity presented with chief complaint of 3 days of vivid nightmares and hallucinations. He denied abdominal pain, vomiting, imbalance, or other neurologic symptoms. He did report increased life stressors (college coursework) in the week prior to his symptom onset, [...]

Case Presentation: Collapsing glomerulopathy, a variant of focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), is characterized by segmental and global collapse of the glomerular capillaries marked by significant hypertrophy and hyperplasia of podocytes causing severe tubulointerstitial disease. (1) There has been an emergence of these cases among African American patients with COVID-19, especially those with the apolipoprotein L1 [...]