Background: Comanagement is a structured collaboration between hospitalists and a surgical service to improve outcomes of surgical patients perioperatively. We identified the potential to improve patient safety and throughput metrics on the Surgical Oncology and Otolaryngology (ENT) services at our institution. We partnered with these two services to create a novel Surgical Oncology Comanagement Service. [...]

Background:    Electronic consults (“e-consults”) are commonly used in the outpatient setting to allow subspecialists to provide documented recommendations to primary care doctors without a face-to-face patient encounter. In the inpatient setting, a consult that does not require a patient encounter is often handled via informal conversation (“curbside consult”) – the consultant is not reimbursed [...]

Background: Consultative medicine is an important part of Internal Medicine (IM) resident education. According to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, residents are expected to “act in a consultative role to other physicians and health professionals.” However, individual programs each have the ability to integrate the consultative experience into training in their own unique [...]

Background: Consultative medicine has been identified as a core part of internal medicine (IM) resident education by providing the opportunity for residents to care for the non-medical patient. In the early 1980s, two separate academic institutions detailed the initiation of their General Medicine Consultation service. They described who consulted them and the reason for consultation. [...]

Outcomes of an ‘Attending-Only’ Hospitalist Bedside Procedure Service Background: Patients admitted to the hospital frequently require bedside procedures including central venous catheter placement, paracentesis, thoracentesis, and lumbar puncture.  Procedure training varies across residency programs resulting in varying levels of competency among practicing physicians.1 In addition, the time consuming nature of these procedures has led to [...]

Background: Inpatient hospitalization represents a key time for patients who use tobacco to quit smoking, and inpatients who receive smoking cessation counseling, nicotine replacement, and referral to outpatient resources have increased quit rates six weeks after hospital discharge. However, in 2014, only 34.5% of tobacco users admitted to our 600-bed academic hospital were documented as [...]