Background: Teaching Hospitalists provide a large proportion of clinical medical education for Internal Medicine Residents with varying levels of training and success.  We sought to identify common habits of highly rated teaching hospitalists in preparation of faculty development.   Methods: We surveyed high performing daytime teaching hospitalists at 3 teaching sites across 2 health systems.  Paper [...]

Background: Early career faculty often face challenges in setting personal and professional expectations, identifying effective mentorship, and quickly learning foundational skills in academic hospital medicine. We developed a “Faculty Boot Camp” to better orient new faculty at the beginning of the academic year with the goal of introducing them to key skills and concepts that [...]

Background:   Internal medicine training programs have been profoundly impacted by changes in resident duty hours, workloads, and supervisory requirements. Consequentially, it has become increasingly important to re-evaluate and re-formulate traditional methods of teaching to maximize the delivery of clinical education, efficiently identifying and taking advantage of learning opportunities where they may exist.  Overnight care [...]

Background: Obesity affects a large majority of the U.S. population, and hospitalizations may represent opportunities to intervene and promote weight loss.  We sought to determine if multidisciplinary patient-centered inpatient weight loss consults, post-discharge telephone text messages, and primary care follow up could result in weight loss. Methods: We conducted a feasibility study comparing 25 obese [...]

Background: To address safety risks with transitions from hospital to home, the IMPACT collaborative designed, tested and implemented the Pediatric Patient Centered Care Transition (PACT) Bundle. The bundle element “perfect” handoff (timely and complete) aimed to improve hospitalist handoff to outpatient providers at hospital discharge.Our objective was to  assess outpatient medical provider’s perceptions of hospitalists’ handoff [...]

Background: Handoffs are a part of inpatient medical care and can lead to patient care errors and threats to their safety.  Incomplete care transitions during service changes are associated with uncertainty of patient care plans. Current literature on handoffs focuses on day-night handoffs. Our project is intended to assess and improve handoffs at service change [...]

Background: Hospital medical groups use various staffing models which systematically affect care continuity during the admission process. Our service changed models of care from a “general model”, where hospitalists who perform hospital rounds and discharges also perform admissions on the same service day, to an “admitter-rounder model”, where service work is divided each day between [...]

Background: To facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration targeting specific quality improvement (QI) and patient safety goals, the Armstrong Institute of Johns Hopkins Medicine has facilitated development of “clinical communities”—interdisciplinary groups of clinicians and administrators from across the health system with a shared interest in a  specific patient type or clinical issue. Within this framework, the hospitalist clinical [...]

Background: There is a huge desire to have hospitalist program in smaller community and rural hospitals. Few hospitals will be reluctant to have their own hospitalist program due to multiple issues. Bothwell Regional Health Center (BRHC) is a general medical and surgical hospital in Sedalia, MO, with 132 beds, located 68 miles west of Columbia, [...]

Background: As part of the Choosing Wisely campaign, the Society of Hospital Medicine highlights use of telemetry monitoring as one of the top interventions that physicians and patients should use judiciously.  While telemetry is invaluable when used appropriately, unnecessary telemetry utilization has several drawbacks, including cost as well as potentially reducing patient mobility and ability [...]