Background: Palliative care can improve outcomes and quality of life for people with serious illness and is a critical aspect of care for hospitalized patients. Despite calls for more palliative care consultation services (PCCS), little is known about how PCCS structure and characteristics change over time. Such information is important for understanding how to sustain […]

Background: Prolongation of the QT interval is associated with adverse cardiac events, mainly a distinctive ventricular tachycardia known as Torsades de Pointes. Prolonged QT can be congenital or acquired and is OFTEN measured as a corrected QT interval of >450 msec for men and >470 msec for women. In a world where medical knowledge and […]

Background: Death certificates are legal documents that permit families to finalize a multitude of end‐of‐life tasks. Physicians play a key role in generating these documents, in partnership with hospital staff, funeral directors, and state health departments. Although delays and errors in the completion of death certificates increase waiting times for families and, anecdotally, have been […]

Background: Antipsychotics are frequently used in the hospital setting for managing both acute and chronic neuropsychiatric disorders. However, antipsychotics have been associated with higher rates of adverse events, including mortality, due to their association with QT prolongation, which can lead to fatal cardiac arrhythmias such as torsade de pointes, earning a black box warning for use in dementia related psychosis. Yet, […]

Case Presentation: A 42‐year‐old woman with multiple sclerosis presented with cough, fever, and malaise. The patient had been admitted 2 weeks prior with similar symptoms; she was given a diagnosis of community‐acquired pneumonia and discharged with oral antibiotics, but symptoms persisted. Her multiple sclerosis was controlled on natalizumab without functional limitations. Medical history was otherwise […]

Background: Hospital readmissions within 30 days of discharge have gained national attention and account for more than $17 billion in avoidable U.S. Medicare expenditures each year. (1) In 2011 alone, there were approximately 3.3 million adult 30-day all-cause hospital readmissions, costing the US $41.3 billion.(2) As such, efforts have been made to create algorithms to […]

Case Presentation: A 37 year-old woman with a past medical history of depression and chronic knee pain presented with complaints of two day duration non-radiating 8/10 epigastric and lower abdominal pain associated with nausea and vomiting. Vitals sings were normal. Abdomen was soft, non-distended with generalized tenderness, but without masses, rebound, or guarding. Lipase was […]

Case Presentation: Coronary artery aneurysms (CAA) are incidental findings during coronary angiography noted during 0.15-4.9% of patients[1]. These are usually a consequence of atherosclerotic coronary disease, the absence of which should raise the suspicion of prior incomplete Kawasaki disease (KD)[2]. We present one such case noted at an academic tertiary medical center in India.  A […]