Background: The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1.7 million patients per year develop hospital-associated infections (HAI), of whom 99,000 die. HAIs financially impact the United States healthcare system with an estimated cost of $6 billion per year. At Platte Valley Medical Center (PVMC) in 2013, the urinary catheter utilization ratio and rates [...]

Background: Risk stratifying patients for potential development of hospital-related venous thromboembolism (VTE) is an important aspect of inpatient safety and is recommended by current guidelines.  Many risk stratification tools are cumbersome and require significant time to complete.  Developments have been made to partially or fully automate risk stratification tools, however there are restrictions within the [...]

Background: Accurate problem lists linked to the electronic medical record (EMR) can be a source of structured clinical data useful for communication among clinicians for patient care, clinical decision support design, and EMR phenotyping.  Nevertheless, modifying the electronic problem list is disruptive to clinician workflow under traditional charting methods, resulting in incomplete, inaccurate, and outdated [...]

Background: Communication breakdown plays a part in the majority of adverse events in healthcare. Physician to physician handoffs are particularly prone to communication errors, yet have been shown to be more complete when systematized according to a standardized bundle. However,  the degree to which individual elements of this bundle, including written versus verbal handoffs, contribute [...]

Case Presentation: A 58- year-old female presented with vomiting, dizziness, and a blood pressure of 80/60 mmHg. Laboratory: serum creatinine 3.1 mg/dl (baseline 1 mg/dl), BUN 34 mg/dl (baseline 10 mg/dl), corrected calcium 12.3 mg/dl, low PTH , normal 25-OH vitamin D, and normal PTH-related protein. Two months prior, serum calcium was normal and 25-OH [...]