Background: Sepsis is the leading cause of death in US hospitals; prompt recognition and treatment are critical. Early sepsis recognition and treatment varies depending on location (ED/floor/ICU) and evaluation time (presentation vs during stay). “Sepsis response teams” (SRT) improve sepsis care. After our hospital system implemented a “best-practice alert” utilizing Epic’s “sepsis score” (SS) to […]

Background: Systematic and real-time gathering of data is central to the feedback loop to help providers guide and continuously improve their practice in a Learning Healthcare System (Figure 1). Despite these worthy goals health systems rely on Electronic Medical Record systems (EMRs) that make the routine collection and analysis of data for providers a laborious, […]

Background: Documentation shortcut tools in electronic health records, such as dot phrases, are essential in a busy clinical environment to promote efficiency and standardize care, but are known to carry risks. The extent to and mechanism by which dot phrase errors occur are poorly characterized. In addition, there are no defined interventions for hospitalists to […]

Background: Medication reconciliation (MR) is foundational to patient safety during and after a hospital admission. Although many electronic health records (EHRs) have a dedicated space for documenting home medications on admission, use of such EHR sections remains variable. Providers may opt to record the MR only in the admission H&P, which is not easily updated […]