Background: Healthcare disparities have existed for decades, yet it took a global pandemic to put this emergency into the spotlight. The Joint Commission states “health related social needs” (HRSN) are the root cause of many disparities. HRSN encompasses a wide spectrum including inability to pay bills, poor access to transportation, and lack of housing. At [...]

Background: Healthcare disparities have existed for decades, yet it took a global pandemic to put this emergency into the spotlight. The Joint Commission states “health related social needs” (HRSN) are the root cause of many disparities. HRSN encompasses a wide spectrum including inability to pay bills, poor access to transportation, and lack of housing. At [...]

Background: Prior studies have found Black and Hispanic patients are more likely to experience disparities in pain management. Fewer studies have evaluated pain control based on age, sex, body mass index (BMI), or presence of a substance use disorder (SUD). While factors influencing management of acute pain are complex, striving for adequate pain control remains [...]

Background: The Centers of Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) in 2024 will require hospitals to screen and report two of the following five health-related social needs (HRSN): food insecurity, housing instability, transportation needs, utility difficulties, and interpersonal safety (1). These regulations improve screening, however, institutions are still left with questions on how to address these HRSN, [...]

Background: Oxygen saturation (SpO2) is often overestimated in darker skinned individuals (1–3), but the ideal method to quantify this phenomenon and measure its impact on clinical outcomes is unclear. Studying the distributions of SpO2 may not be the appropriate method because these distributions are influenced by clinicians’ real time efforts to maintain SpO2 in a [...]

Background: Safety-net hospitals are disproportionately affected by the national intensivist shortage. The Society of Critical Care Medicine estimates the U.S. needs over 48,000 intensivists, but fewer than half are available. This shortage is pronounced in rural and underserved urban areas, leaving hospitalists in resource-limited settings to manage critically ill patients with minimal or no intensivist [...]