Background: Healthcare distrust, the belief that healthcare providers or systems often do not act in a patient’s best interest, is an important social determinant of health.(1,2) This distrust disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minorities due in part to sociodemographic factors, healthcare access, and discrimination.(3,4) This study reports baseline impressions of healthcare distrust levels reported during [...]

Background: Health literacy (HL) strongly influences patient outcomes (1), yet many hospitals rely on rapid screening tools such as the Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine–Short Form (REALM-SF), which assesses medical word recognition but not comprehension (2). The Joint Commission’s 2022 Health Equity Standards require hospitals to identify and address social needs, including literacy, [...]

Background: Hospitalists increasingly care for patients with complex behavioral, psychosocial, and chronic pain needs with limited support, which can erode professional satisfaction and contribute to burnout (1). In phase 1 of this project, we used mixed methods to identify patient types that hospitalists experience as most challenging: patients with chronic pain syndromes and frequent pain [...]

Background: Introducing medical residency programs into community hospitals can raise concerns about potential negative effects on care quality and patient satisfaction. Patient experience is a core quality metric linked to clinical outcomes, yet evidence is limited on how launching a new residency affects patient experience in previously non-teaching settings. Our objective is to evaluate the [...]

Background: Out-of-pocket costs (OOPCs) have risen considerably, increasing the financial burden even among insured individuals. Higher cost-sharing is linked with decreased medication adherence and delayed or foregone care, but the impact of acute financial burden following hospitalization on subsequent readmission is not well established. This study examined the association between OOPCs incurred during chronic obstructive [...]

Background: Ethical decision-making is fundamental to patient care in hospital medicine. Prior scholarly efforts to define what is special about ethics in hospital medicine have been limited. As previous studies have shown, much of the ethical decisions that come up on hospitalist teams are handled informally, either at the bedside by the treating hospitalist or [...]

Background: A limited evidence base, vulnerability to opioid-related stigma and racial bias, and healthcare system constraints contribute to suboptimal inpatient care for people with Sickle Cell Disease (SCD). Health care professionals (HCP) are forced to contend with these constraints during inpatient SCD care delivery, which can lead to distress and burnout. Moral distress is a [...]

Background: Hospitalization for alcohol withdrawal syndrome (AWS) is frequent, accounting for over 2 million national admissions annually in the United States.[1, 2] Benzodiazepines remain the guideline-recommended treatment for AWS, yet many hospitals are adopting phenobarbital protocols leading to potentially different practices within hospital emergency departments (EDs), intensive care units (ICUs) and medicine floors.[3, 4] There [...]

Background: The prolonged boarding of admitted patients in the Emergency Department (ED) increases crowding, a significant challenge for hospitals. To alleviate crowding, some hospitals have implemented hallway boarding, the practice of placing patients in inpatient hallways when standard rooms are unavailable. However, the impact of hallway boarding on patient preferences, clinical outcomes, and patient safety [...]

Background: Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), a heterogeneous clinical entity with a wide range of inciting pathogens, remains a significant cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. The recent COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent shifts in clinical and diagnostic practices necessitate an updated understanding of the contemporary epidemiologic and etiologic landscape for non-COVID CAP. Methods: This retrospective cohort study [...]