Background: Equity is an essential domain of healthcare quality [1] but is rarely addressed within quality measurement programs. Quality initiatives, without explicit equity focus, may exacerbate underlying disparities.[2]To address this historic lack of focus on equity, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) now provides confidential reports to hospitals on two disparity metrics for Medicare [...]

Background: Unconscious bias within the U.S. health care system has been linked with disparities in the treatment of patients by age, gender, and race (1). While many factors contribute to these disparities, implicit bias may play a significant role. Stigmatizing language often reflects the implicit bias that healthcare providers possess toward patients (2). Recent research [...]

Background: Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color (BIPOC), other underrepresented minority (URM) individuals, and women have been historically underrepresented in scholarly writing and research. Junior faculty members may face similar experiential, psychological, and logistical barriers to scholarly participation. We sought interventions to improve hospitalists’ scholarly writing production, specifically those tailored for women, BIPOC, and other [...]

Background: It is well established that there is a persistent gender gap in promotion in academic medicine despite an equal number of male and female medical students for the past 20 years. Possible mediators of this gender gap include differences between men and women in years on faculty, measures of productivity such as number of [...]

Background: Stigmatizing language in clinical notes can negatively impact physician attitudes, propagate bias, affect prescribing behaviors, and exacerbate healthcare disparities, yet remains prevalent even in the Open Notes era. Prior analyses of stigmatizing terms in clinical notes are limited by the lack of context in which terms are used and multiple meanings of certain words [...]

Background: Patients with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) face multiple barriers to care and are at risk for worse health outcomes compared to similar patients with English Proficiency (EP). In sepsis, a common diagnosis and major cause of mortality in the US, the association of LEP with health outcomes has not been widely explored. We aimed [...]

Background: Pain is assessed by nurses through either reported or observed intensity. Self-reported assessments, specifically a numeric score, are the gold standard and preferred to behavioral assessments. Disparities in the assessment and management of pain across race, ethnicity, and language status are prevalent, but we do not know how actual numeric pain scores vary and [...]

Background: Assessing and treating pain in older adults is challenging. Although having patients self-report pain on a numeric scale is the recommended approach, age-associated conditions such as dementia, delirium, and impaired vision or hearing can prevent patients from effectively communicating their symptoms. Older patients are also at risk of adverse effects from commonly used analgesics [...]

Background: The three most common childhood-onset chronic conditions for which adolescents and young adults (YA) use pediatric hospitals are congenital heart disease (CHD), cystic fibrosis (CF), and sickle cell disease (SCD). Existing studies do not establish clear clinical benefits to continued pediatric hospitalization over hospitalization at adult hospitals. We aimed to determine if if continued [...]

Background: Structural inequities in healthcare are widespread and best documented in racial and income related inequalities to care. Prior studies show macro level differences in access to healthcare, insurance and medications as explanations for healthcare inequities. The opening of a second hospital in a suburban academic center with entirely private patient rooms presented a rare [...]