Background: Adolescent reproductive health education is essential to prevent transmission of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and teen pregnancy. Half of all new STIs occur among 15-24 year-olds and 1 in 4 adolescent females has had an STI. In the United States, approximately 750,000 teenagers become pregnant per year. Adolescents are known to have poor access [...]

Background: With access to big data in medicine, it is becoming increasingly necessary to use tools to automate the pooling of data into relevant thematic structures. Topic modeling is most often used to uncover these thematic structures in large sets of textual data. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is one such algorithm-based topic model that has [...]

Background: The Emergency Room departments and the Intensive Care Units (ICU) remain the main locations for the treatment of patients with severe sepsis and septic shock. Nevertheless, health-care systems may have limited resources and insufficient ICU beds for attending patients who might benefit from more intensive monitoring than in a general ward. In this context, [...]

Background: Acute otitis media (AOM) is a commonly overtreated pediatric diagnosis. Since 2014, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has recommended a ‘wait-and-see’ strategy and shorter antibiotic courses for mild or moderate AOM in qualifying patients. While this strategy has been successfully implemented in some pediatric emergency units (EUs), studies have shown that 30-90% of [...]

Background: Patients with immune-mediated diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, or inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are increasingly being prescribed biologics. While biologics may account for roughly 2% of total prescriptions in the United States, they account for over 35% of net drug spending and for over 80% of the growth in net drug spending.1,2 [...]

Background: Lumbar puncture (LP) is commonly needed in hospitalized patients for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Traditional landmark identification by palpation of the lumbar spine and pelvis often has a low success rate. There is strong evidence showing that the use of ultrasound leads to higher success rates, along with other important patient-centered outcomes such [...]

Background: Currently, patients admitted to the hospital are assigned specific levels of care such as intermediate intensive care or acute care. Differences among care at these levels largely differ through nursing ratio as well as frequency of nursing assessment. Costs per day for patients at different levels of care differ significantly as well. Little is [...]

Background: Physicians are increasingly using the social media outlet, Twitter, as a medium to connect and engage. Specifically, Twitter-based journal clubs have created a space for clinicians, educators and researchers to disseminate and discuss recent research. Recognizing this developing landscape, the Journal of Hospital Medicine (JHM) began producing a CME-accredited Twitter-based journal club, called #JHMChat [...]

Background: A crowning step upon graduation from internal medicine (IM) residency training is the successful completion of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) licensing exam. ABIM Initial Certification Exam pass rates declined significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic from the preceding 4-year rolling test rate for first-time takers. Graduates of our IM residency training program [...]

Case Presentation: 54 years old man with a history of hypertension was hospitalized due to elevated BUN/creatinine of 33/4.6 mg/dL and Hb of 9.9 mg/dL (baseline 15). He endorsed dyspnea on exertion, anorexia and weight loss of 15 pounds in 6 months. One month ago, he was treated for acute bronchitis with levofloxacin and was [...]