Background: Every year, as many as 98,000 people die from medical errors within the hospital, making medical errors one of the top 10 leading causes of death in the United States(1). While the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has incorporated healthcare quality and patient safety into the Clinical Learning Environment Review (CLER) program […]

Background: Microaggressions are subtle, indirect words or actions that create hostility, communicate disrespect, or imply a sense of exclusion. Over time, these microaggressions can contribute to physician burn-out and negatively impact well-being. Although studies have found that a majority of physicians have been subjected to these deleterious comments by patients, many physicians have never received […]

Case Presentation: A 79-year-old female with a history of metastatic cholangiocarcinoma treated with chemotherapy and a Whipple procedure 17 years before admission presents with deconditioning and weakness secondary to peri-prandial abdominal pain and poor oral intake. This problem existed since her Whipple but progressed over the last year, complicated by cachexia, weakness, and inability to […]

Background: Quality Improvement (QI) is a methodology for solving complex systems problems, and QI methods have been adapted from industry and spread widely across healthcare over the past two decades. QI methods are particularly well-suited for examining clinical processes for effectiveness, reliability, and efficiency. However, Design Thinking (DT) is a problem solving methodology that applies […]

Background: Hospital throughput and length of stay (LOS) are important drivers of success in an increasingly competitive healthcare landscape where revenues are down and demand can exceed hospital capacity. More specifically, longer LOS and hospital throughput bottlenecks impact access to timely care, the quality and safety of care delivery, patient and family satisfaction, and provider […]

Background: Accurate documentation of the patient’s diagnoses helps to reflect the severity of illness which has several downstream impacts: clinical outcomes data, risk stratification, hospital quality metrics data such as readmission and mortality index, hospital reimbursement. For this reason, our health system has various ongoing initiatives on clinical documentation to improve the specification of certain […]

Background: Hospital at home (HaH) programs have provided critical inpatient-level care to acutely ill patients throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.1 Despite the documented benefits2-5, referral rates for HaH often mirror capacity demands. The pattern reflects implementation barriers including the tendency to default to usual care and time constraints.6 Continued success of HaH hinges on the question […]