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: 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: Assessing severity of illness using available electronic medical record (EMR) data on admission and predicting inpatient mortality is very challenging. Lacking standardized practices around end of life issues, hospitalists use their clinical judgment in making these crucial decisions. Prolonged discussions may be needed in medically complex patients to direct an optimal plan of care [...]

Background: Communication between patients, nurses and physicians is vital to patient care. Prior studies have shown that a substantial number of hospitalized patients do not understand their care plan and that physician-nurse co-location or time spent communicating have little impact on physician-nurse concordance of plan of care. To our knowledge, there have been no prior [...]

Background: Point of Care Ultrasound (POCUS) is a goal-directed, bedside ultrasound examination performed by a healthcare provider to answer a specific diagnostic question or guide performance of an invasive procedure at the bedside. More hospitalists have begun to use POCUS, but little is known about current POCUS usage by hospitalists. We conducted a national survey [...]

Background: Teaching Hospitalists provide a large proportion of clinical medical education for Internal Medicine Residents with varying levels of training and success.  We sought to identify common habits of highly rated teaching hospitalists in preparation of faculty development.   Methods: We surveyed high performing daytime teaching hospitalists at 3 teaching sites across 2 health systems.  Paper [...]

Background: Many patients continue their post-acute care in settings such as skilled nursing facilities (SNFs). One in four hospitalized Medicare patients are discharged to SNFs. These patients are generally the elderly or require more care than patients discharged home, placing them at greater risk of clinical decline and rehospitalization. Moreover, 25% of patients discharged to [...]

Background: Early career faculty often face challenges in setting personal and professional expectations, identifying effective mentorship, and quickly learning foundational skills in academic hospital medicine. We developed a “Faculty Boot Camp” to better orient new faculty at the beginning of the academic year with the goal of introducing them to key skills and concepts that [...]

Background: With increasing numbers of hospitalist attending as well as demands of documentation and supervision, the # of days an attending physician remains with a team has been reduced at many academic medical centers. This reduction in attending physician continuity may impact the learners (teaching, receiving effective feedback) while potentially improving faculty experience (reduced burnout [...]

Background:   Congestive heart failure (CHF) and pneumonia are amongst the leading causes of hospitalization in the United States.  Although a growing number of hospitals use both teaching and nonteaching hospitalist services for patient care, the differences in clinical outcomes and efficiency between these two services is not clearly known. The aim of this study [...]