Background: Gamification and social incentives, such as family/peer engagement in goal-setting and feedback, are increasingly used by employers and health plans to promote physical activity and lose weight in outpatient settings but these approaches have not been used to improve mobility and reduce hospital-associated functional decline after hospital discharge. Methods: 12-week randomized, controlled trial of [...]

Background: Hospital crowding and subsequent resource strain have been associated with worse patient outcomes and increased length of stay (1–3). As pediatric hospitals face an overwhelming respiratory illness surge in the wake of the COVID pandemic (4–6), improving hospital patient flow is all the more critical. Nonetheless, a substantial proportion of patients, nearly 1 in [...]

Background: The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) incentivizes acute care hospitals to decrease their preventable readmissions by putting hospitals at risk of reduced Medicare reimbursements. There exist many sources of heterogeneity in the actual incentives individual hospitals face each year. The HRRP applies the same methodology to hospitals regardless of their share of Medicare patients, [...]