Background: Assessing severity of illness using available electronic medical record (EMR) data on admission and predicting inpatient mortality is very challenging. Lacking standardized practices around end of life issues, hospitalists use their clinical judgment in making these crucial decisions. Prolonged discussions may be needed in medically complex patients to direct an optimal plan of care [...]

Background: ED visits increased to 145.59 million in 2016 (CDC 2019), resulting in an increase in hospital admissions. Chen et al. showed a correlation between the overall ED census and likelihood of admission; while, Velasquez et al. found up to 28% of hospitalists reported having admitted patients when no admission criteria were met. They described [...]

Background: Prior exposure to antibiotics is associated with a subsequent risk for sepsis (Baggs et al., 2018). However, there are limited data on characteristics of patients readmitted with sepsis following previous antibiotic exposure during a non-sepsis related hospitalization. We sought to characterize factors associated with sepsis-related readmission (SRR) within 30 days of a non-sepsis index [...]

Background: Acute pancreatitis (AP) is one of the most common causes of hospitalization in the United States. Intravenous hydration with normal saline (NS) is the most commonly used fluid for resuscitation. Recent studies have shown better outcomes with the use of more pH balanced fluid-like ringer’s lactate and Plasmalyte (PL). We conducted a retrospective cohort [...]

Background: Unstable Angina (UA) is a common subset of Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) and presents as atypical chest pain without the presence of cardiac biomarkers. It accounts for nearly 550,000 hospital admissions each year in the United States [1]. Management of UA can vary depending on the physician and/or intensity of symptoms. Prior studies have [...]

Background: Pneumonia is a major health concern despite advances in preventive measures including vaccinations. In the United States, Pneumonia is one of the most common cause of hospital admissions other than child birth. One million adults seek care in a hospital due to pneumonia every year with nearly 5% succumb to Pneumonia(1). We sought to [...]

Background: In the United States, the relative incidence of diverticulitis has continued to rise and represents a significant portion of gastrointestinal related hospitalizations [1]. Management and treatment can include both medical and surgical options. Of recent, considerable attention has been given to try to decrease healthcare utilization [2]. We sought out to determine the annual [...]

Background: There is a significant impact of influenza on the individuals, families, and societies, both economically and clinically, in terms of hospital admissions, medication expenses and side effects, secondary bacterial infections and more days off from work or other forms of reduced productivity for the patients or their caretakers. Our objective is to present the [...]

Background: Many hospitals have focused on discharging patients before noon as a goal to improve throughput and decrease length of stay. However, those patients who can be discharged early in the day may actually represent a loss and not a win for the system, as they could have potentially been discharged the evening before. Methods: [...]

Background: It has been recently shown that patients admitted at night and during the weekend have worse mortality outcomes. The impact of those variables on other important outcomes such as length of stay (LOS) and readmission is less clear. We sought to analyze this relationship in a large cohort of inpatients. Methods: We performed a [...]