Background: The low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) might be protective in patients with sepsis. We sought to characterize potential association of hyperlipidemia (HLP) vs no HLP with all-cause mortality among patients hospitalized for pneumonia. Methods: This is a retrospective observational study. The initial cohort consisted of consecutive 8,553 adults hospitalized at a large academic center with [...]

Background: Higher rates of 30-day readmissions are associated with lower quality hospital care, and readmissions may put patients at risk for worse health outcomes including death. Historically, 20% of hospitalized Medicare beneficiaries were readmitted within 30 days, and many readmissions appeared avoidable. Accordingly, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented the Hospital Readmissions [...]

Background: Mortality prediction models are increasingly being adopted in the clinical setting, both to retrospectively assess quality of care and to prospectively inform clinical practice. An open question is whether a particular hospital should employ a model trained using a diverse nationwide dataset or use a model developed primarily from local data. The Veterans Affairs [...]

Background: Publically reported data is increasingly important to a hospital’s reputation and bottom line. Programs such as CMS Hospital Value Based Purchasing (HVBP) place 2% of a hospital’s base payments at risk, while the CMS Star Rating is frequently used by consumers to select a hospital for elective care. Both programs incorporate claims data to [...]

Background: Approximately 1.6 million patients are transferred between hospitals yearly, with disproportionately high cost and mortality. Despite the risk associated with inter-hospital transition of care, there is no established best practice in coordinating and triaging transfers. This gap in knowledge is partly driven by a dearth of studies which integrate clinical data before and after [...]

Background: Initial management of acute upper gastrointestinal bleeding (UGIB) aims towards aggressive fluid resuscitation to maintain hemodynamic stability. Existing evidence regarding benefit of early endoscopy is unclear with some studies suggesting mortality benefits and some suggesting otherwise. The purpose of this study is to evaluate if there is any mortality benefit of doing early endoscopy [...]

Background: COVID-19  has claimed over 260,000 American lives (1), disproportionately affecting older adults (2). High mortality rates in older adults, along with the potential need for resource allocation, placed an even higher importance on the timely discussion and documentation of advance directives (3). The aim of our study was to determine the prevalence of early [...]

Background: Current data indicate that racial and ethnic minorities bear a disproportionate burden of COVID-19 infection and mortality (1-4). Consequently, communities with a higher proportion of minorities are expected to have a higher burden of infection and mortality, however, this hypothesis has not been tested. Therefore, we estimated the disparities across US counties in the [...]

Background: Acute heart failure (AHF) is the major cause of hospital admission and death. Furthermore, patients admitted with AHF have high readmission rates and  postdischarge mortality. Although there have been some reports, which demonstrated the predictive factors of death among patients of acute heart failure in the USA and Europe, there has been no studies [...]

Background:   Congestive heart failure (CHF) and pneumonia are amongst the leading causes of hospitalization in the United States.  Although a growing number of hospitals use both teaching and nonteaching hospitalist services for patient care, the differences in clinical outcomes and efficiency between these two services is not clearly known. The aim of this study [...]