Background: Research suggests that high workloads in the inpatient setting (often measured through patient encounters/visits) contribute to increased hospital length of stay, increased costs, and delayed discharges. High workloads also negatively impact our quality improvement efforts and result in a mismatch in job demands and job resources leading to clinician burnout. To date, there is [...]

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: Across the field of Hospital Medicine, there is a “call to arms” to build robust faculty development programs(1). Medical education and clinical teaching are common career interests for early career hospitalists (ECH), defined as hospitalists ≤5 years since postgraduate training. ECH often pursue academic positions to explore an interest in medical education, but find [...]

Background: Coordination of inpatient and outpatient care is an important challenge in improving population health but evidence examining the effectiveness of existing care coordination programs is mixed. The Comprehensive Care Physician (CCP) Program at the University of Chicago provides patients at increased risk of hospitalization the opportunity to receive inpatient and outpatient care from the [...]

Background: Although point-of-care ultrasound can improve patient care and reduce unnecessary downstream costs, few economic models exist on hospitalist use and whether remuneration for imaging could offset equipment costs.  As the heart and lungs are commonly examined during admission, we observed the frequency of use and projected fiscal outcomes of point-of-care cardiac ultrasound by an [...]

Background: Since 2010, 130 rural hospitals have closed, leaving only 2,250 rural hospitals remaining in the United States. Of the remaining facilities, outmigration and/or the bypassing of the local hospitals to a larger facility remains problematic and impacts a community’s access to healthcare while affecting the long-term business viability of the city. In December of [...]

Background: Diagnostic errors (DEs), or the failure to accurately identify or provide timely explanations of a patient’s health problem, are a significant source of patient harm. DEs occur in up to 23% of adult inpatients who transfer to intensive care units (ICU) or die. Few studies have examined how clinician team composition impacts DE risk. [...]

Background: In a time when rural hospitals across the United States are closing for various reasons and local residents are left with limited access to healthcare, our academic medical center successfully built one of the few new rural facilities in the country and opened it in January 2023. The new hospital is a seventeen bed [...]

Background: Coordination of inpatient and outpatient care is an important challenge in improving population health but evidence examining the effectiveness of existing care coordination programs is mixed. The Comprehensive Care Physician (CCP) Program at the University of Chicago provides patients at increased risk of hospitalization the opportunity to receive inpatient and outpatient care from the [...]

Background: Although point-of-care ultrasound can improve patient care and reduce unnecessary downstream costs, few economic models exist on hospitalist use and whether remuneration for imaging could offset equipment costs.  As the heart and lungs are commonly examined during admission, we observed the frequency of use and projected fiscal outcomes of point-of-care cardiac ultrasound by an [...]