Background: There is minimal automated electronic feedback to hospitalists about their level of service in professional billing. Based on today’s payor requirements for inpatient admission, the medical decision-making involved in the care of inpatients almost always justifies a level of service above level 1. However, encounters may still receive level 1 due to under-documentation (e.g. […]

Background: There is minimal automated electronic feedback to hospitalists about their level of service in professional billing. Based on today’s payor requirements for inpatient admission, the medical decision-making involved in the care of inpatients almost always justifies a level of service above level 1. However, encounters may still receive level 1 due to under-documentation (e.g. […]

Background: Academic hospitalists have identified teaching learners as the most fulfilling aspect of their jobs. Components of effective clinical education include teaching at the bedside and giving feedback. To enhance and develop the teaching and professional developmental skills of early-career hospitalists, the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM), the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM), and […]

Background: With the advent of high‐resolution cross‐sectional imaging, incidental findings (IFs) have become an increasingly common occurrence. Though workup guidance is available for a few IFs (such as a pulmonary nodule), there are no guidelines on when and how to work up the various IFs seen in hospitalized patients. This has led to a wide […]

Background: As our healthcare system shifts towards a patient satisfaction model, programs focusing on improving physician communication skills have been on the rise. Many of these programs have focused on outpatient providers as it can be more difficult to capture provider-patient communication in the inpatient setting. Most of the patient feedback obtained for inpatient providers […]

Case Presentation: The patient was 69‐year‐old man with an extensive medical history including dementia with delirium, end‐stage renal disease, ischemic heart failure, and a recent subarachnoid hemorrhage. He presented from his dialysis center with enterococcal sepsis. Even before his acute illness, his home dialysis center had been increasingly concerned about delirium during dialysis. While hospitalized, […]

Background: Hospitalists are tasked with improving care quality across several different inpatient metrics. These include length of stay, readmission rates, health care associated infections, system capacity and patient satisfaction scores. While most quality metrics are driven by systems of care, it can be challenging for frontline providers to address variations in individual practice, if any, […]

Case Presentation: A 38‐year‐old man presented with complaints of left ear pain and black discoloration for 1 day. He denied any hearing loss, aural fullness, discharge, or fever. His medical history included a history of gout and right fist abscess secondary to MRSA. His family history was unremarkable for autoimmune diseases. He denied any allergies […]

Case Presentation: A 55‐year‐old woman with cirrhosis due to hepatitis C and hepatocellular carcinoma presented with 6 months of progressive cognitive impairment and gait imbalance despite treatment for hepatic encephalopathy. On exam, she was easily distracted, inconsistently recognized family members, had short term memory impairment, bilateral hand resting tremors, cogwheeling in wrists, and slow, wide‐based […]

Background: In the quest to improve patient satisfaction scores, providers and health systems alike are frustrated with the inability to obtain real-time satisfaction data. Indeed, HCAHPS data lags by six months, and makes it exceedingly difficult to provide real-time feedback to physicians on their communication with patients. As a result, we developed a patient-centered audit […]