Background: Drug overdose deaths involving opioids are on the rise in the setting of the current opioid epidemic in the United States (US).1 In 2017 there were ~46.6 drug overdose deaths a day in the US involving prescription opioids.1 Naloxone is a proven and effective opioid antagonist that is FDA approved for use in the [...]

Background: Opioid overdose in the United States continues to rise. Naloxone is an opioid antagonist that is FDA-approved for reversing opioid overdose. Current CDC guidelines recommend prescribing naloxone to patients at high risk of opioid overdose, including patients with concurrent benzodiazepine use, a prior history of overdose, and those receiving high doses of opioids (>50 [...]

Background: Early identification of sepsis is the main driver for patient survival. Roughly 30% of patients diagnosed with severe sepsis do not survive. To drive the desired clinical behavior, it is crucial to identify appropriate sensitivity and specificity of a sepsis early detection system. At our institution, we saw a 515% increase in Sepsis Alerts [...]

Background: Best-Practice Alerts (BPAs), utilized to reduce the number of adverse events in medical settings, have limited efficacy partly due to alert fatigue and user desensitization. Alert fatigue often stems from inaccurate alerts firing too often as well as poor physician perception of the efficacy of the alerts, both of which lead to reduced physician [...]

Background: Advance care planning (ACP) conversations are essential for aligning care with patients’ values, particularly for high-risk hospitalized patients. However, there are limited tools in hospital medicine to identify and prompt clinicians to engage in ACP conversations effectively. Best Practice Alerts (BPAs) are commonly used in electronic medical records (EMRs) to streamline clinical workflows but [...]