Background: Increased life expectancy has raised the number of elderly patients suffering from hip fractures. This frail population and its surgical-related complications are scarcely known. We performed a single-center descriptive study involving centenarian patients to depict their management and complications. Methods: Centenarians with a hip fracture admitted to a single level I trauma center from [...]

Background: Due to their widespread availability, inflammatory markers are used with increasing frequency, often concurrently, without adding any diagnostic or clinical benefit1,2. While unnecessary labs do not offer any additional benefit, they can be a significant source of physical and emotional distress to patients and their families3-5. In an era that emphasizes high-value, low-cost medical [...]

Background: Closing the gap between evidence-supported antibiotic use and prescribing patterns among clinicians is a vital component of curbing excessive antibiotic use, a practice that fosters antimicrobial resistance and exposes patients to the side effects of antimicrobial agents. Providing medication prescribing information via scorecard has been shown to improve clinician adherence to quality metrics in [...]

Background: Early discharges from inpatient units improve throughput from the Emergency Department (ED) and reduce ED boarding. ED boarding increases patient safety events, provider burnout, and decreases patient satisfaction. Multidisciplinary communication between hospitalists, nursing staff and case management is essential for facilitating early discharges from inpatient medicine units. Such communication frequently requires in-person care coordination [...]

Background: The pediatric discharge education process currently struggles with a lack of standardization, miscommunication between care team members, and non-patient-centered discharge communication. These issues contribute to medical errors, increased readmissions, patient dissatisfaction, and unnecessary healthcare costs. The purpose of this study is to understand the current level of caregiver comprehension in our hospital, streamline the [...]

Background: Disposition planning is a vital part of clinical care in the hospital setting and requires a collaborative multidisciplinary approach. Physical therapy (PT) assessments are often a key part of this process but due to staffing shortages and high acuity – both of which were exacerbated by the COVID pandemic – therapists at a large [...]

Background: Errors in medication reconciliation frequently occur at transitions of care. Patients discharged to skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of these mistakes. An interprofessional team at UVA Health implemented a longitudinal quality improvement (QI) project to reduce medication reconciliation errors for patients discharging from acute care medicine services to SNF. [...]

Background: Using average length of stay (LOS) as a quality indicator for individual hospitalists is problematic because it is a metric typically attributed to the discharging attending, who may not have cared for the patient for the majority of the hospitalization. In addition, a hospitalist may have a long average LOS if they are skilled [...]

Background: Minority and low-income populations are more likely to be hospitalized and/or re-hospitalized for acute asthma, a key indicator of poorly controlled disease. While hospitals have attempted to improve asthma care by implementing individual-level care interventions, inequities persist during inpatient stays and in intervention delivery. Little is known about the impact of “bundled” systems-level interventions [...]

Background: Outside hospital (OSH) transfer processes vary across institutions. The fragmented and complex nature of OSH transfers pose patient safety risks. A recent implementation of a standardized OSH transfer process with templated note for hospital medicine patients at our institution demonstrated promising patient safety outcomes and a significant increase in physician satisfaction. This pilot study [...]