Background: At all academic medical centers, nurses and resident physicians are two prominent front-line contributors to the care of patients. During a patient’s hospital stay, they receive communication regarding their diagnosis, test results, management, and plan of care from both the resident physicians and the nursing staff. Therefore, it is critical to have effective communication […]

Background: Despite medical advancements for organic and structural diseases, effectively managing acute and chronic functional pain syndromes remains a daunting challenge for hospitalists. Standard inpatient treatments frequently fail to adequately control symptoms, often compelling hospitalists to shift from diagnostics to the contentious task of tapering opioids in patients with legitimate pain. This pivot can lead […]

Background: In hospital medicine, around 250,000 diagnostic errors occur yearly in American hospitals and a significant proportion are attributed to failures in clinical reasoning. Feedback on the diagnostic process has been proposed as one method of improving clinical reasoning. However, in the current healthcare system barriers to the delivery and receipt of feedback include limited […]

Background: Affecting approximately 5.9% of the US population, alcohol use disorder (AUD) has been established as a prevalent disease in this country (1). Through repeated hospital admissions for alcohol use disorder (including alcohol withdrawal syndromes), hospital costs have steadily risen to recent estimates of 7.6 billion dollars in 2017 (2). Without the establishment of outpatient […]

Background: The traditional role of hospitalists is to provide care to patients hospitalized with acute medical conditions. Over the past few years, this has evolved to improve care transitions and stewardship of hospital resources. Many hospitals may embed hospitalists in the Emergency Department (ED) to improve patient flow into the hospital; however, there are sparse […]

Background: In 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to enhance health insurance access through subsidies and Medicaid expansion. The expansion was not adopted by all states, leading to variable coverage. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) releases a 3-year running average of 30-day risk-standardized mortality rates for Medicare patients […]

Background: Although hospitals should be a place of healing and restoration, multiple studies demonstrate that hospitalized patients face acute sleep deprivation due to potentially modifiable disruptions (vitals, medications, tests). Acute inpatient sleep deprivation is also associated with worse health outcomes both in-hospital and post-discharge. While staff-directed sleep interventions show benefits, no study has tested whether […]

Background: New hospitalists can often feel overwhelmed by learning system practices, navigating difficult dispositions, and managing difficult patient and family relationships. This can lead to increased length of stay1, increased burn out, and a feeling of lack of mentorship. Purpose: We hypothesized that weekly meetings between a hospitalist director and a junior faculty hospitalist to […]

Background: Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is a promising new tool to monitor patients who have historically required observation visits in a hospital, or would have remained hospitalized longer if initiated at hospital discharge, and was widely used in the COVID-19 pandemic. We report the outcomes of hospital admission and urgent/emergent care service utilization in a […]

Background: The CDC Core Elements of Antibiotic Stewardship recommend that patients initiated on broad-spectrum antibiotics (BSA) undergo antibiotic de-escalation within 48-72 hours based on available culture data. However, adherence with this recommendation in patients with sepsis has not been well studied. We assessed the incidence of, and characteristics associated with, anti-methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) […]