Background: The onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic created innumerable challenges and demanded rapid innovation for perioperative medicine. In March 2020, in response to our institution’s expectations, our hospitalist-led preoperative medicine clinic rapidly pivoted to patient care via telehealth. Purpose: Before the pandemic, our hospitalist-led preoperative medicine clinic was already in the early planning stages [...]

Background: Perioperative medicine is a complexed area of hospitalist medicine, with many nuanced clinical management scenarios. At Froedtert and the Medical College of Wisconsin, Hospital medicine and perioperative medicine are two separate sections within the division of general internal medicine. The sections share some clinical services, including night coverage and sick (“jeopardy”) call. Perioperative medicine [...]

Case Presentation: A 67-year-old man with tobacco use disorder, class I obesity, OSA, and recurrent basal cell carcinoma (BCC) of the external auditory canal presented to his preoperative appointment prior to planned surgical removal of his BCC with partial temporal bone resection, parotidectomy, and reconstruction. At the time, he endorsed subacute progressive dyspnea, dry cough, [...]

Background: Patient safety indicators (PSI) are hospital quality measures designed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to capture potentially-preventable adverse events. PSI-12 is defined as perioperative pulmonary embolism (PE) or deep vein thrombosis (DVT). It is unclear how active COVID-19 infection, which is known to be associated with coagulopathy, has impacted PSI-12 [...]