Background: Research suggests that high workloads in the inpatient setting (often measured through patient encounters/visits) contribute to increased hospital length of stay, increased costs, and delayed discharges. High workloads also negatively impact our quality improvement efforts and result in a mismatch in job demands and job resources leading to clinician burnout. To date, there is [...]

Background: Since 2010, 130 rural hospitals have closed, leaving only 2,250 rural hospitals remaining in the United States. Of the remaining facilities, outmigration and/or the bypassing of the local hospitals to a larger facility remains problematic and impacts a community’s access to healthcare while affecting the long-term business viability of the city. In December of [...]

Background: Research suggests that high workloads in the inpatient setting (often measured through patient encounters/visits) contribute to increased hospital length of stay, increased costs, and delayed discharges. High workloads also negatively impact our quality improvement efforts and result in a mismatch in job demands and job resources leading to clinician burnout. To date, there is [...]

Background: Since 2010, 130 rural hospitals have closed, leaving only 2,250 rural hospitals remaining in the United States. Of the remaining facilities, outmigration and/or the bypassing of the local hospitals to a larger facility remains problematic and impacts a community’s access to healthcare while affecting the long-term business viability of the city. In December of [...]

Background: Many patients continue their post-acute care in settings such as skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). One in four hospitalized Medicare patients are discharged to SNFs. These patients are generally the elderly or require more care than patients discharged home, placing them at greater risk of clinical decline and rehospitalization. Moreover, 25% of patients discharged to [...]

Background: Hospital medicine is a rapidly growing specialty, but prior studies have raised concern that hospital medicine’s research output has not kept up with its clinical importance. The ongoing evolution of hospital medicine into an academic field requires clinician-investigators with dedicated time and funding to support research contributions. National Institute of Health (NIH) Career Development [...]

Background: Physician burnout is a ubiquitous problem in healthcare characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a sense of reduced accomplishment from daily work. Though research has been done to evaluate the national burden of burnout in hospitalists, the impact of specific drivers of burnout and engagement is not yet well described. Drivers identified in the [...]

Background: As hospitalists often serve marginalized patients and have system-wide influence, hospital medicine is well positioned for promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ). While representational diversity may be tracked, inclusion can be harder to assess. As hospitalists engage in DEIJ efforts, it is important to understand what ‘success’ in inclusion looks like. We sought [...]

Background: A frequently cited challenge to parenting as a clinician relates to family leave policies. Taking parental leave may negatively affect clinicians’ income, research, career, and relationships with colleagues. Parental leave policies may be unfair, vague, or poorly communicated. We sought to describe the parental leave experiences and approaches used to support parental leave and [...]

Background: Hospital Medicine has grown rapidly as a clinical specialty, but the specialty’s inroads in research have been more limited. We sought to understand the current state of research in adult Hospital Medicine. Methods: We repeated a 2018 survey of leaders in the field with changes to improve the response rate and representativeness of surveyed [...]