Background: Hospital medicine is a maturing field that increasingly focuses on providing high value patient care. A key question in the value equation is how different patient census sizes impact care. Our recent research showed that higher patient censuses were associated with longer hospital length of stay and costs. This study follows up on this [...]

Background: Racism is a public health crisis impacting patients and healthcare workers. Antiracist education is not typical in undergraduate or graduate medical education curriculum. Discriminatory practices in health care result in worse patient outcomes in Black, Indigenous, & People of Color (BIPOC). Committing to antiracist work is the first step in addressing racism and must [...]

Background: People experiencing homelessness (PEH) face barriers to accessing regular ambulatory care, which increases their risk of having poorly controlled chronic medical conditions and contributes to high acute care utilization. The role of field-based homeless healthcare teams in improving hypertension and diabetes control and reducing acute care utilization (e.g., emergency department [ED] visits, inpatient hospitalizations) [...]

Background: Fracture Liaison Services (FLS) are traditionally outpatient-based and led by orthopedists or endocrinologists. In the United States, over 1 million patients are hospitalized yearly with osteoporotic fractures and internal medicine hospitalists are frequently involved in their co-management. Purpose: Internal medicine hospitalists have an integral role in the prompt recognition and early treatment of patients [...]

Background: Antibiotics targeted against C. difficile bacteria are necessary, but insufficient, to achieve a durable clinical response because they have no effect on C. difficile spores that germinate within a disrupted microbiome. ECOSPOR-III evaluated SER-109, an investigational, biologically-derived microbiome therapeutic of purified Firmicute spores for treatment of recurrent CDI. Methods: Adults ≥18 years with recurrent [...]

Background: In the dawning era of precision medicine, increasingly sophisticated tools are becoming available to diagnose and investigate rare and unexplained diseases. The application of these tools to clinical practice will require new models of collaboration between clinicians, tool developers, and laboratory investigators. Many structural barriers to such collaboration exist in our current healthcare delivery [...]

Background: Hospitalization is costly, associated with the potential for adverse medical events and may have deleterious health effects.  Hospitalist physicians are uniquely positioned to help patients avoid unnecessary hospitalizations.  Our attending-only hospitalist practice in a tertiary academic center admits approximately 350 patients monthly, the majority of which are referred through the emergency department (ED).  Our [...]

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: In 2015, medical students in their clinical clerkships (traditionally known as third year medical students) began rotating directly with hospitalist attendings. As we began crafting the rotation, we sought to provide value that was not leveraged elsewhere in their clerkships. Different organizations, including the Liaison Committee on Medical Education and Association of American Medical [...]

Background: Over the last several years we have seen the rapid growth of the specialty of hospital medicine across the country. One of the unintended consequences of this expansion has been the decrease in direct teaching responsibilities of the medical subspecialists on the inpatient medical teaching services. As these responsibilities have been subsumed by our [...]