Background: Sepsis, severe sepsis, and septic shock combined, are estimated to affect between 650,000 and 750,000 Americans annually, and has an associated mortality rate between 20 to 50%.  Early identification of patients with sepsis is critical, as treatment delays are associated with significant increases in mortality. The electronic health record (EHR) contains near-real-time physiologic parameters, [...]

Background: Residents, because they are on the frontlines of the provision of care, are integral to improving care. Yet the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has reported residents are not as engaged in improving patient safety as they could be, noting, “Though most residents and fellows were aware of their [clinical learning environment]’s [...]

Background: Patient experience is an important outcome for hospitals. These outcomes impact insurer payments, hospital ratings, and perceived quality of care (1). Like many hospitals, our patient experience is measured using Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) surveys administered by Press Ganey (PG). Response rates to PG surveys are low, especially from [...]

Background: Incident reporting systems are widely utilized to detect adverse events and remain central to many hospital patient safety programs. It is well established that non-physicians file the majority of incident reports, but the barriers to physician reporting are not well understood. Therefore the aims of this study are to understand physicians’ perceived barriers to [...]

Background: Patients with cancer require reliable venous access for therapy. Although peripherally inserted central catheters (PICCs) and implanted ports are often used to meet infusion needs, risk of complications between these devices is unknown. We did a systematic review and meta-analysis to compare the risk of deep vein thrombosis (DVT), exit-site complications and central line-associated [...]

Background: Many red blood cell transfusions (RBCT) are unnecessary or harmful according to clinical trials and guidelines. These RBCT put patients at risk and waste scarce healthcare resources. Clinical decision support (CDS) using the Epic™ computer provider order entry system has reduced unnecessary transfusion (Goodnough et al, Transfusion 2014) at one center with a post-intervention [...]

Background: Patient portals are a digital health technology that help caregivers engage with their child’s healthcare. Unfortunately, significant disparities in portal use exist, with caregivers who speak languages other than English (LOE) having lower usage rates compared with their English-speaking counterparts. No pediatric study has sought to understand why and how LOE caregivers use patient [...]

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has required healthcare systems to meet new demands for rapid information dissemination, resource allocation, and patient tracking and reporting. To help address these unique challenges, the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) has leveraged Integrated Clinical Pathways (ICPs), which are flexible decision support tools integrated directly into the electronic health record. [...]

Background: Routine patient care including vital signs checks, lab draws, medication administration, during the night contributes to the already disturbed sleep of inpatients. This study aimed to assess the performance of automated risk scores to stratify the risk of an overnight deterioration to better inform letting low-risk patients sleep and more intensively monitoring and/or intervening [...]

Background: Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) is a potentially life-threatening disorder and in some cases, is related to underlying hypercoagulability which may be congenital or acquired. Guidelines suggest performing extensive work -up for hypercoagulability only in select patients: those with close family history of VTE at young age ( < 45), young age at first VTE (<45), [...]