Background: The availability of beds within healthcare systems has been stressed during each wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare systems with tertiary hospitals have had increasing patient volumes and face limitations of specialized urgent (e.g., ECMO) and routine (e.g., Percutaneous Coronary Intervention) functions during critical inpatient surge volumes. Reserving the limited capacity at a tertiary [...]

Background: Frequently hospitalized patients face unique challenges in navigating health care systems. Although practice-, hospital-, and accountable care organization-level programs to address the needs of these patients exist, interventions have had mixed results, with only some demonstrating reduction in hospitalizations or costs. To best serve frequently hospitalized patients and improve future interventions, clinicians, leaders, and [...]

Background: As patient satisfaction surveys become a routine part of physician performance evaluations, it is increasingly important to study the tools that are utilized to evaluate this performance. Little research has been performed to assess the metrics of these tools. Top box percentage is frequently used to report physician performance but the relationship of top [...]

Background: Obesity increases the risk of severe illness, hospitalizations, and death from most acute illnesses – particularly infectious diseases. (1,2) African American communities have been greatly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and are disproportionately impacted by the obesity epidemic in this country. (3, 4) However, little is known of their knowledge and attitudes related to [...]

Background: Over the last few decades, roles and specialties in medicine have proliferated, complicating inpatient care. Care teams can include multiple types of clinicians, whose roles and responsibilities may be unclear. This can impact how patients understand who is in charge and various aspects of their care. We sought to examine these questions:1. How well [...]

Background: To evaluate prevalence of non-adherence to breast cancer screening guidelines after bedside educational intervention and informed individualized risk assessment score during an inpatient stay. Methods: A prospective intervention study was conducted among 507 cancer-free (except skin cancer) women aged 50-75 years hospitalized to a general medicine service. Study intervention included one-on-one bedside education via [...]

Background: Google searches for hospitals typically yield a Google star rating (GSR). These ratings are an important source of information for consumers. The degree to which GSRs are associated with traditional quality measures has not been evaluated recently. We sought to characterize the relationship between a hospital’s GSR, its Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers [...]

Background: Despite the proven mortality benefit of screening colonoscopy, approximately 27% of hospitalized women are non-adherent with colorectal cancer screening guidelines. Colonoscopy is the most frequently used test for colorectal cancer screening in US. Although Medicare and most insurance plans would cover screening colonoscopy, colorectal cancer screening has not been part of usual hospital care. [...]

Background: Evidence-based COVID-19 management has evolved with unprecedented speed; however, the rate and fidelity with which institutions have adopted new evidence into practice is unknown. Methods: We surveyed members of the Hospital Medicine Reengineering Network (HOMERuN) from 12/17/20-2/10/21 and compared their institutional COVID-19 management recommendations to available evidence from pivotal randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and [...]

Background: Acknowledging that a successful career in hospital medicine (HM) may require specialized skills, residency programs have developed hospital medicine-focused education (HMFE) programs. Surveys of internal medicine residency leaders have described HMFE curricula but are limited to that specialty and lack input from early career hospitalists (ECHs) who recently completed this training. Therefore, we surveyed [...]