Background: Vitamin D deficiency is common in elderly patients with low‐trauma hip fractures, and major practice guidelines recommend screening for deficiency in this population. Our hospitalist group admits all patients with acute hip fracture, with co‐management by orthopedics. Our group had no standardized approach to assessment of and treatment for vitamin D deficiency in this [...]

Background: 2Procedure teams led by hospitalists are successfully being launched at many academic institutions around the country. Many of them have shown both direct and indirect benefits. Commonly offered procedures by these teams include thoracentesis, paracentesis, lumbar puncture, and central line insertion. To the best of our knowledge, pigtail chest tube insertion is not a [...]

Background: In recent years, our institution has faced challenges in meeting our health system’s rigorous targets for CMS Core Measures for Heart Failure (HF). Our overall Appropriate Care Score for HF, while exceeding the national average, has lagged behind the other hospitals in our health system. Our scores have largely been driven by the HF‐1 [...]

Background: Hospitalists are increasingly an integral component of the programs, services, and quality improvement initiatives within their hospital system. The utilization of “peer hospitalists” during the orientation (i.e., on‐boarding) period may enhance adaptation of group policies and priorities, and support career advancement. The traditional approach to on‐boarding focuses on informational items, such as how to [...]

Background: Previous research suggests that over 60% of patients have a prescription medication discrepancy on admission to the hospital. At discharge, most patients have at least one new medication change from their home regimen but as many as 40% of these patients are not alerted to the change. These discrepancies have the potential for harm. [...]

Background: Many hospitalist groups struggle to maintain high engagement of providers. Poor provider engagement can create communication silos and inhibit collaboration. Since hospitalists are accustomed to decentralized networking via the Internet, we created a secure, online social platform integrated with our clinical documentation and billing processes to improve hospitalist engagement in clinical, administrative, and educational [...]

Background: Reducing unnecessary high‐cost imaging has received increasing emphasis. With substantial financial investments in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, there are great expectations for health information technology (HIT) as a potential solution. Yet, the impact of HIT on use of imaging remains largely [...]

Background: The House of Godimmortalized the capricious Medical Admitting Resident who decides on assignment of patients based on favors and grudges. In reality, this has always been a complicated role and it has evolved over time and in different settings based on the local needs and changes in emergency department and medicine service staffing. At [...]

Background: Hospital communication is an integral component of clinical care but is often inefficient and error‐prone. Specifically, sending and receiving pages is a burdensome process involving significant time that later must still be conveyed to other providers in the form of additional communications or progress notes. Purpose: Our goal was to target pager burden, improve [...]

Background: Many hospitals have a subset of patients who require extended inpatient care due to a combination of complex social and medical factors. Most traditional Hospitalist staffing models are suboptimal for providing continuity of care for such patients. In addition, Hospitalists may not be trained to provide long term acute care or prolonged sub‐acute care, [...]