Background: Residents are uniquely positioned to learn from and contribute to informatics. As key electronic health record (EHR) users, they offer practical solutions and feedback. Resident informatics engagement promotes EHR proficiency and accelerates implementation of best practices and quality improvement. Understanding how clinical data are structured creates a foundation for future scientific inquiry using clinical [...]

Background: Medication reconciliation (MR) is critical for patient safety during hospital admissions and transitions, though MR completion may be complicated by factors such as lack of familiarity with the electronic medical record (EHR) or missing information at admission. Over the past three years, our urban academic quaternary care hospital has led a successful MR improvement [...]

Background: Nationally, internal medicine (IM) residency programs have been struggling with the balance of protecting residents from exposure to COVID-19, ensuring they are sufficiently trained in general medicine while still teaching them about a new disease process and preparing them to help fight the pandemic (1). Anxiety is common amongst providers in a pandemic, especially [...]

Background: In hospital-based medicine, maintaining an open line of communication between inpatient teams and community pediatricians serves as an essential component of providing comprehensive patient care and ensuring continuity at time of discharge. At St. Louis Children’s Hospital, inpatient resident teams are responsible for providing timely communication with community pediatricians regarding major patient events. Despite [...]

Background: Delays in the discharge of the hospital ward patients cause a backlog for new admissions from the Emergency Department, and transfers from the Intensive Care Units and telemetry units. This bottleneck unnecessarily increases overall resource utilization and also negatively impacts patient care and satisfaction. Therefore, our Internal Medicine Residency Program aimed through this quality [...]

Background: Over the past few decades, many institutions have elected to implement night float systems in place of traditional call systems for residents. With the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education enacting duty hour restrictions in 2003, these changes toward stricter work hour requirements and institution of night float systems have been found to have [...]

Background:  The Society of Hospital Medicine considers stroke care to be a core competency in hospital medicine.  Hospitalists must be prepared to lead inpatient stroke alerts, as neurologists may not be readily available outside of academic medical centers.  However, even graduates of hospitalist training programs may report insufficient experience in leading these complex, time-pressured, high-stakes [...]

Background: Case-based scholarship and education are important and longstanding sources of knowledge about new diseases, rare presentations of known diseases, and side effects of treatments. Cases are commonly used to teach clinical decision-making and to tie together theoretical topics to real-life patient care. Hospital Medicine provides access to a myriad of clinical cases. However, sharing [...]

Background: Internal medicine residents face multiple barriers to participating in and documenting goals of care (GOC) meetings in the intensive care unit (ICU). Barriers include heavy workloads, need for urgent stabilization of critically ill patients, and inadequate communication skills training. Guidelines recommend regularly conducting and documenting GOC meetings for critically ill patients, to facilitate communication [...]

Background: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s Clinical Learning Environment Review (CLER) program has placed a much-needed spotlight on the role of resident physicians in patient safety (PS) and quality improvement (QI). Medical school training in PS/QI is highly variable and our residents received very limited formal training in PS/QI prior to the intervention [...]