Background: Geographic co-location, the practice of cohorting a panel of patients on the same hospital unit for a single provider or team, is increasingly popular, with 36.4% of adult hospitalist groups reporting unit-based assignments [1]. Benefits include increased hospitalist-patient interaction time, increased odds of multiple same-day patient visits, improved productivity, and greater interdisciplinary communication [2-4]. [...]

Background: Hospital throughput is key to help optimize the availability of inpatient beds. It is well known that throughput decreases through the weekend due to a variety of reasons. Because of this voltage drop, Monday becomes a crucial day to safely discharge patients that have had delays on the weekend. Our Hospitalist Division mostly follows [...]

Background: Tobacco use is the most widespread preventable cause of cancer and is linked to 30% of cancer-related deaths.(1) Many smokers want to quit but are unsuccessful; tools such as nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) products can increase quit rates by 50-60%.(2) While smoking cessation is the ideal way to combat tobacco-related diseases, screening for diseases [...]

Background: Many U.S. emergency departments (EDs) and hospitals experience critical overcrowding and capacity challenges which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.(1) ED boarding has been associated with a range of adverse outcomes, and pre-pandemic data suggests that racial minority patients may be disproportionately impacted.(2-4) We aim to identify the effects of patient race and [...]

Background: The emergence of hospitalists over the last 25 years as leaders in quality, safety, and value-based care has resulted in improvements in hospital throughput and reduction of in-hospital complications (1). The keys to success are standardizing clinical pathways and interdisciplinary collaboration. At Tampa General Hospital (TGH), our hospitalist team observed significant variability in the [...]

Background: The leadership of our academic hospital medicine group designed a geographic rounding intervention with the goal of improving patient-nursing communication, decreasing hurdles in discharging patients and eventually leading to reducing patient length of stay and increasing discharge rate. Our quantitative analysis compared the pre-intervention and post-intervention time periods with regard to observed to expected [...]

Background: Multiple educational modalities have been utilized to teach high value care to trainees, including lectures, facilitated group discussion, and behavioral nudges and prompts (1–3). However, little has been done to compare different educational strategies delivered via the same modality. The goal of this study was to explore whether different educational prompts encouraging thoughtful lab [...]

Background: Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a leading cause of preventable in-hospital mortality and a primary focus of quality improvement/patient safety efforts. VTE prophylaxis reduces the incidence of in-hospital VTE, but nonadministration rates—primarily attributed to patient refusal—often reach 10-15%. Notably, nonadministration of VTE prophylaxis may correlate with higher incidence of hospital acquired VTE. Prior studies showed [...]

Background: Excessive laboratory use has been associated with increased hospital costs, increased incidence of anemia, and unnecessary additional testing and procedures. Previous studies have focused on resident interventions within teaching hospitals amongst other residents, but few studies have had residents intervene on non-teaching faculty. A quality improvement initiative was implemented at our institution to reduce [...]

Background: Helicobacter pylori (HP) infection is one of the most prevalent chronic bacterial infections, infecting more than half of the global population. The sensitivity of HP diagnostic tests decreases with the use of antibiotics and/or antisecretory drugs. Given the increasing rates of macrolide resistance worldwide, comprehensive testing for HP eradication is imperative. In this quality [...]