Background: Structured mortality review can help identify care issues and focus quality efforts, but existing methods have limitations. In the Department of Medicine at UCLA, we developed a novel in-person, near real-time, interdisciplinary rapid mortality review (RMR) process to capture the insight of frontline providers and improve care. In this study, we compare the yield [...]

Background: Structured mortality review can help identify care issues and focus quality efforts, but existing methods have limitations. In the Department of Medicine at UCLA, we developed a novel in-person, near real-time, interdisciplinary rapid mortality review (RMR) process to capture the insight of frontline providers and improve care. In this study, we compare the yield [...]

Background: For most people, music serves as a calming influence or as a pleasurable stimulus that lifts their spirits. Hospitalized patients may experience boredom, fear, and unease while in the hospital, away from the comforts of home during their acute illness. In an attempt to both distract and cheer up hospitalized patients, we designed a [...]

Background: Unexpected overnight adverse events are known to correlate with worse outcomes in inpatients.  Unfortunately, the exact occurrence and etiologies of such events have been less known.    Purpose: The aim of our study was to clarify the occurrence, etiologies of unexpected overnight adverse events and also propose the algorithm so that the catastrophic events [...]

Background: Thrombophilia testing is frequently ordered in the inpatient setting. However, testing is costly and can be misleading in the setting of acute thromboembolism or concurrent anticoagulation use. Furthermore, hereditary thrombophilias do not predict a clinically significant increase in VTE recurrence. Methods: We conducted an educational intervention with a randomized cross-over design for Internal Medicine [...]

Background: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates over 1.2 million Americans are living with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). Of those, approximately 14% are unaware of their HIV-positive status. In 2014, most hospitals adopted some form of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and one year later, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services extended [...]

Background: Readmissions after hospitalisation are a healthcare quality indicator and carry considerable financial penalties in some healthcare systems. Internationally, readmission rates at 28 – 30 days for medical inpatients range between 10 – 22%. However there is almost no information available around readmissions for medical inpatients in the Middle East region. We conducted a pilot [...]

Background: Patient understanding of prescription medication regimens is an important aspect of health literacy and inpatient medication reconciliation. There is a lack of data regarding patient knowledge of their own outpatient prescription medications. This study evaluated the ability of patients admitted to a community hospital medicine service to provide, from memory, their preadmission prescription medication [...]

Background: Misuse of laboratory tests can be difficult to determine unless tests are clearly overused or repeated routinely. However, excessive testing of chronically critically ill patients treated in long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs) can be potentially harmful. A previously reported quality improvement initiative designed to increase physician awareness of their patterns of lab utilization in [...]