Background: In 2011, ~3.3 million adult 30-day US hospital readmissions generated $41.3 billion in hospital costs. $8.26 billion (20%) of this was considered preventable. Numerous studies demonstrate relationships between hospital readmissions and social determinants of health (SDoH). Lack of education, socioeconomic status, and lack of social support have all been cited as core contributors to [...]

Background: End-of-service handoffs on inpatient general medicine services occur when there is a transfer of care to new providers, often at the end of a scheduled rotation. This is high-risk time for patients as increased in-hospital mortality has been observed around the time of end-of-service handoffs. The Society of Hospital Medicine recommends use of a [...]

Background: Limited data exist about the magnitude of and the factors associated with one-year mortality of medical patients after their hospital discharge. Factors known during the hospitalization may be associated with high mortality risk. One may also wonder whether healthcare utilization during the first 30 days after discharge are also of any prognostic value for [...]

Background: Handoffs are critical to safe and efficient transfer of patient care between hospitalists. While patient handoffs are essential to hospitalist practice, there is great variability in handoff content, preparation, and delivery. Our study aimed to characterize handoff practices at a large academic hospitalist group, which primarily utilizes a written handoff platform. Methods: We conducted [...]

Background: Effective teams share common attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions that support teamwork. Within patient safety literature, effective teamwork is a core feature of interventions that reduce adverse events. However, research on teamwork in healthcare has focused on teams of healthcare professionals and has not examined how patients and their family caregivers experience teamwork as part [...]

Background: In a learning healthcare system, data collected as part of routine care is used to fuel innovation and improvement. Predictive models for post-discharge adverse events have relied on data that is available prior to hospital discharge. Post-discharge care (e.g. appointments, phone calls) can be collected from electronic health records and may impact patient risk [...]

Background: Millions of people are hospitalized in the United States annually and many of those patients are medically complex requiring a team-based approach to care for their medical problems and complex planning for discharge and the transitions thereafter. The process of discharging a patient is multilayered, time-consuming, and arguably one of the most pivotal times [...]

Background: Patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) face barriers communicating with their medical providers and understanding their treatment plans. Prior work shows that communication barriers limit LEP patients’ understanding of their discharge instructions. However, little is known about disparities in outcomes between LEP and English proficient (EP) patients. To address this gap, we measured the [...]

Background: In an effort to improve the design of future noninferiority studies, the endpoints for registrational trials of antimicrobials for the treatment of community-acquired bacterial pneumonia (CABP) were recently updated [1]. Lefamulin (LEF) is a first-in-class systemic pleuromutilin antibiotic newly approved for the treatment of adults with CABP [2]. The efficacy of LEF was demonstrated [...]

Background: Inter-hospital transfer (IHT, the transfer of patients between hospitals) exposes patients to risks of discontinuity of care, including errors in communication. However, the association between communication among providers during IHT and patient outcomes has yet to be rigorously studied due to limitations of administrative data to adequately capture quality of communication. In this study, [...]