Background: Understanding a hospitalist’s efficiency is important to identify opportunities to provide support and prevent burnout (1). This is key when onboarding new hospitalists, as early intervention can lead to rapid improvement and a long-term sustainable career. The evaluation of hospitalist efficiency can be difficult and is often thought to require close clinical shadowing or [...]

Background: Quality improvement and patient safety (QI/PS) is a major focus for hospitalists in both their day-to-day clinical care. In addition, many hospitalists have educational and administrative QI/PS duties, and salary support for them is highly sought after. As part of an ongoing effort to help identify opportunities to further support members of the Society [...]

Background: Fall for hospitalized patients can cause significant injury and have devastating long term consequences for patients with 33% resulting in injury, 4-6% causing serious injury (1). Information is available regarding risk factors for falls and specific patient or nursing centric interventions to prevent falls, but there is little known about the physician perspective in [...]

Background: The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) incentivizes acute care hospitals to decrease their preventable readmissions by putting hospitals at risk of reduced Medicare reimbursements. There exist many sources of heterogeneity in the actual incentives individual hospitals face each year. The HRRP applies the same methodology to hospitals regardless of their share of Medicare patients, [...]

Background: Misalignment of goals of care at the End-of-Life exposes patients to risk and the health care system to considerable costs. A lack of end of life conversations can lead to unrealistic patient expectations, patient harm, and multiple hospital readmissions. This study aims to identify physician perspectives on the barriers to initiating end of life [...]

Background: Hospital Medicine is being increasingly involved in improving various metrices of inpatient care such as length of stay and cost of care. Patients who do not meet ‘inpatient criteria’ often contribute to significant financial costs to hospitals and remain in ‘observation status’ during their hospital stay. Observations units which were introduced by emergency doctors [...]

Background: Drug overdose deaths involving opioids are on the rise in the setting of the current opioid epidemic in the United States (US).1 In 2017 there were ~46.6 drug overdose deaths a day in the US involving prescription opioids.1 Naloxone is a proven and effective opioid antagonist that is FDA approved for use in the [...]

Background: Guidelines suggest venous thromboembolism risk stratification, and against use of prophylaxis in low risk medically ill hospitalized patients. Our hospital did not have a formal risk stratification process embedded into the electronic medical record (EMR) for provider use, and therefore it was common practice to administer pharmacologic prophylaxis to most medically ill patients regardless [...]

Background: Heart failure (HF) is a major cause of hospital readmissions and healthcare costs. HF patients have the highest rate of unexpected readmission of all diseases tracked by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), at 21.2% (1). HF prevalence is also projected to increase 46% from 2012 to 2030, with total costs rising [...]

Background: Interventions to improve inpatient sleep rely on the ability to objectively quantify sleep; however existing methods of measurement (wrist actigraphy and patient survey) are resource intensive and impose a burden on patients. To overcome these barriers, we developed “sleep opportunity” (SLOP), a surrogate metric for sleep derived solely from the electronic health record (EHR). [...]