Background: Patient experience (PEX) is associated with higher levels of adherence to recommended prevention and treatment processes, better clinical outcomes, improved patient safety within hospitals, and decreased inappropriate health care utilization. (1,2,3) Furthermore, overall patient satisfaction is associated with lower 30-day risk standardized hospital readmission rates after adjusting for clinical quality. (4) Our hospital medicine [...]

Background: Interest in hospital medicine is rapidly growing, with a more than 50% growth rate of hospitalists between 2012 and 2019. Despite this large increase in practicing hospitalists, few formal residency resources exist to help internal medicine residents navigate the job application process and support their early hospitalist careers. While most residents will successfully seek [...]

Background: Case-based scholarship and education are important and longstanding sources of knowledge about new diseases, rare presentations of known diseases, and side effects of treatments. Cases are commonly used to teach clinical decision-making and to tie together theoretical topics to real-life patient care. Hospital Medicine provides access to a myriad of clinical cases. However, sharing [...]

Background: Hip fractures are one of the most common causes for surgery in the elderly and the burden of care extends beyond the perioperative period as many are discharged to a long-term facility and have significant morbidity and mortality despite advances in perioperative care. To date, trials of interventions and standardized multidisciplinary hip fracture programs [...]

Background: In the pre-operative setting, hospitalized patients are often made “NPO” after midnight prior to their procedure. This practice stems from concerns about aspiration of stomach contents intra-operatively, though many studies have established that fluid intake preoperatively does not increase aspiration or other adverse outcomes (1-10). Preoperative fasting has, however, been associated with adverse outcomes [...]

Background: Graduate medical education (GME) comprises residents and fellows being trained at a hospital but also providing essential patient care. At academic hospitals, residents and fellows are often the front-line physicians and an integral part of the interprofessional team. The Accreditation Council for GME (ACGME) requires annual participation by residents and fellows in quality improvement [...]

Background: Joint physician-nurse rounding is an important best practice that facilitates communication and patient participation in their care while improving outcomes and satisfaction. Interdisciplinary bedside rounding has been shown to reduce mortality, lengths of stay, medication errors, and readmissions while improving staff engagement, teamwork, and patient experience (1, 2, 3). In 2018, our hospital added [...]

Background: Clinical documentation integrity (CDI), a process by which documentation is optimized to be both congruent with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) terminology and reflect patient severity of illness, is widely used in healthcare to ensure appropriate coding for hospital reimbursement and improve accuracy of research and quality outcomes. CDI optimization is often performed [...]

Background: To date, there are limited reports around the use of well-designed information technology tools to enhance throughput communication during interdisciplinary rounds (IDRs). In collaboration with our technology innovations center, we developed a Microsoft Teams IDR tool known as “NORA.” NORA is an automated process-oriented tool designed to extract patient summary information from electronic health [...]

Background: Nationwide, hospitals are experiencing high patient volumes, attributed to medical complexity, hospital length of stay, and hospital readmissions, among other factors. In this context, hospitalists’ roles have been expanding to optimize care during and following hospitalization. Post-discharge care is typically managed by primary care providers, and there is sparse information on programs that leverage [...]