Background: New hospitalists can often feel overwhelmed by learning system practices, navigating difficult dispositions, and managing difficult patient and family relationships. This can lead to increased length of stay1, increased burn out, and a feeling of lack of mentorship. Purpose: We hypothesized that weekly meetings between a hospitalist director and a junior faculty hospitalist to [...]

Background: Racism is a public health crisis impacting patients and healthcare workers. Antiracist education is not typical in undergraduate or graduate medical education curriculum. Discriminatory practices in health care result in worse patient outcomes in Black, Indigenous, & People of Color (BIPOC). Committing to antiracist work is the first step in addressing racism and must [...]

Background: Patients hospitalized with COVID-19 can clinically deteriorate in the second week of illness after a period of initial stability. Thus, an important clinical question is determining when it is safe to discharge these patients from the hospital without overwhelming hospitals’ capacities. Unfortunately, discharge criteria for COVID-19 patients are often based on expert opinion, with [...]

Background: Diagnostic errors (DE), defined as missed opportunities to make a correct or timely diagnosis based on the available evidence, are a critical but understudied cause of patient harm. While previous efforts have focused on examining the incidence and factors contributing to DEs in ambulatory and emergency room settings, fewer studies have examined incidence of [...]

Background: Pharmacist-led peri-discharge interventions reduce adverse drug events. However, evidence is lacking as to whether there is a business case to fund these non-billable interventions. To test whether such interventions could drive reductions in post-discharge health care utilization to help build a business case, we conducted a pragmatic randomized controlled trial (RCT). Methods: The PHARMacist [...]

Background: People experiencing homelessness (PEH) face barriers to accessing regular ambulatory care, which increases their risk of having poorly controlled chronic medical conditions and contributes to high acute care utilization. The role of field-based homeless healthcare teams in improving hypertension and diabetes control and reducing acute care utilization (e.g., emergency department [ED] visits, inpatient hospitalizations) [...]

Background: Hospitalizations related to opioid use disorder (OUD) are rising, creating opportunities to initiate medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) and connect patients with outpatient resources.1,2 Despite evidence that MOUD reduces morbidity and mortality, most patients fail to receive evidence-based treatment during hospitalization.3-6 Addiction consultation services are becoming the standard of care to address this [...]

Background: Fracture Liaison Services (FLS) are traditionally outpatient-based and led by orthopedists or endocrinologists. In the United States, over 1 million patients are hospitalized yearly with osteoporotic fractures and internal medicine hospitalists are frequently involved in their co-management. Purpose: Internal medicine hospitalists have an integral role in the prompt recognition and early treatment of patients [...]

Background: Overnight vital sign assessment can disrupt sleep in the hospital and may be unnecessary in clinically stable patients. However, providers may not feel comfortable determining which patients can safely forego overnight vitals. We studied the effect of a clinical decision support (CDS) tool embedded in the electronic health record (EHR) that automatically identified clinically [...]

Background: We have previously showed how implementing the Michigan Appropriateness Guide for Intravenous Catheters (MAGIC) to inform peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) use can lead to more appropriate device use. In this analysis, we assessed the association between appropriateness and PICC-related complications. We hypothesized that improved PICC appropriateness is associated with reduced major PICC complications [...]