Background: Compared to ten other high-income countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the US spent nearly twice as much on healthcare. Yet, compared to these countries, the US has the lowest life expectancy. This disparity will worsen as the US’s national healthcare expenditures rise from $4.1 trillion in 2020 to a [...]

Background: Sepsis is a life threatening medical emergency triggered by an infection and can rapidly lead to tissue damage, organ failure and death. Early identification and treatment can improve mortality by up to 10%. We designed sepsis response team in our hospital to improve mortality index in patients with sepsis. Purpose: Early recognition and treatment [...]

Background: With COVID surge and staffing shortages, there is a significant strain on hospital systems. Emphasis is on throughput, an effective frontline team, and improved patient and provider communication. Interprofessional rounds are a cornerstone of aligning the care teams and formulating a safe discharge plan. Purpose: To achieve timely and effective inter-professional communication and close [...]

Background: Scholarship is crucial in academic medicine. However, most URiM medical students don’t feel prepared to engage in scholarly activity, especially due to lack of mentorship. The URiM Mentorship Platform is a peer mentoring platform at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), designed to organize collaborative networks and interactions between students and faculty with common [...]

Background: Increasingly, hospitalizations are becoming more complex and patients are frequently discharged from the hospital with new medical diagnoses, medications, and need for close follow up care (1,2). In 2009, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act published meaningful use rules for using the Electronic Health Record (EHR), which included that the [...]

Background: Hospital-acquired delirium induced via disruptions of the sleep cycle contributes to increased mortality and morbidity in hospitalized patients (1,2). Surveys of hospitalized general internal medicine patients at our institution, a tertiary academic medical center, have found that sleep duration is decreased in the hospital, with inpatients sleeping on average 4-6 hours, and reporting worse [...]

Background: Structured peer observation programs – in which clinicians observe one another and provide feedback – are potential mediators for spreading “best practices” and encouraging feedback among a group. Studies show hospitalist peer observation programs are feasible, perceived favorably by participants, and lead to improvements in self-reported assessments of teaching abilities. However, existing peer-observation models [...]

Background: Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) conferences are ubiquitous among internal medicine (IM) residency programs, but often fail to improve patient safety and foster learning.1,2 One key determinant of a successful M&M conference is the choice of patient safety event (i.e. M&M case) that is analyzed or presented. However, the characteristics of an effective M&M case [...]

Background: Early recognition of clinically deteriorating patients and subsequent deployment of rapid response (RR) teams can result in “rescue” and avert irreversible patient harm or death. However, early detection of clinical deterioration may be impeded by communication barriers between patients and healthcare providers. In a previous study we published, adult hospitalized primary language Spanish (PLS) [...]

Background: Boarding of admitted patients in the Emergency Department has become an increasingly large problem throughout the country. Longer boarding times are associated with a wide range of adverse effects, ranging from patient discomfort to medical errors and death. Emergency Departments are not designed to provide inpatient care and require frequent diversion of attention and [...]