Background: Today, Medicare patients account for approximately 50% of hospital days. Hospitalists are a key strategy for providing care to hospitalized older adults, however, most of these hospitalists have not received geriatric training. Faculty development is an important component to the success of a hospitalist program. We developed a geriatric-focused lecture series to improve the [...]

Background: The systematization of the teaching and training of internal medicine residents should be done with the standardization of techniques, simulations, use of manikins and theoretical lessons. A procedure team was created in a tertiary teaching hospital at south Brazil with the objective of minimizing risks to the patient at the same time optimizing the [...]

Background: Health care expenditures in the United States have been increasing exponentially while hospital care accounts for one-third of the costs. Approximately 18% of hospitalized Medicare beneficiaries are being readmitted within 30 days following their discharge. As a quality measure, penalties for high readmission rates are inversely affecting the reimbursements.  Currently, research on the factors [...]

Background: Current staffing models cannot deliver the benefits of hospital medicine to the 1300 critical access hospitals (CAHs) located throughout the rural United States.   Staffing each CAH with local hospitalists would require at least 5500 hospitalists (more than 10% of the workforce), to cover less than 2% of the hospitalized population.   A “virtual hospitalist” program [...]

Background: Hospital medicine is the fastest growing specialty in the United States. An interesting aspect of the rapid expansion of hospital medicine is the current expansion of the field beyond North America. While the health care systems, regulations and cultural norms in these nations differ, some of the reasons for the development of hospital medicine [...]

Altered Mental Status in a Psychiatric Patient: A Case of Anti-NMDA Encephalitis Case Presentation: 29-year-old female with a history of Bipolar I Disorder, in remission off medication, presented to the Psychiatric Emergency Department with hyperactivity, insomnia, impulsive purchasing and audiovisual hallucinations for two weeks. The patient was admitted to psychiatry for treatment of mania with [...]