Background: Structured mortality review can help identify care issues and focus quality efforts, but existing methods have limitations. In the Department of Medicine at UCLA, we developed a novel in-person, near real-time, interdisciplinary rapid mortality review (RMR) process to capture the insight of frontline providers and improve care. In this study, we compare the yield [...]

Background: Structured mortality review can help identify care issues and focus quality efforts, but existing methods have limitations. In the Department of Medicine at UCLA, we developed a novel in-person, near real-time, interdisciplinary rapid mortality review (RMR) process to capture the insight of frontline providers and improve care. In this study, we compare the yield [...]

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: As cannabis is legalized/decriminalized in more US jurisdictions, and social norms and perceptions around use change, many products for psychoactive, recreational use, and purported medical uses are available in edible and supplement formats. Rates of unintentional ingestion of cannabis products among children and adolescents have been described in the literature, but there is no [...]

Background: The UCLA Department of Medicine (DOM) Rapid Mortality Review (RMR) is an innovative in-person, near real-time review of all deaths to capture the unique insight of the care providers into aspects of end-of-life care quality that otherwise go undocumented and unreported. The purpose of this study is to examine characteristics of mortality cases that [...]

Background: Primary Metastatic penile cancer (PMPC) is a rare condition, accounts for less than 1 percent of all men cancers in the United States. This review aims to investigate the clinical characteristics, treatment, and outcomes of Advanced-stage PMPC. Methods: PubMed, Medline, Scopus, and ScienceDirect databases were reviewed for the published case reports on “primary penile [...]

Background: Olfactory neuroblastoma (ONB), first described in 1924 by Berger et al., is a rare neoplasm that represents nearly 3% of malignant sinonasal neoplasms. It arises from the olfactory epithelium and tends to invaders local structures and metastasizes to various body organs. Given its diverse ad controversial management strategies, this review investigates the clinical and [...]

Background: Addressing the needs of the geriatric population is critical, as “baby boomers” comprise a larger proportion of hospitalized patients. Hospitalists increasingly care for these complex geriatric patients. The “BEERS Criteria” are evidence-based guidelines that encourage medication safety by describing potentially inappropriate and harmful medications (PIMS) among geriatric patients. BEERS guidelines recommend that with a [...]

Background: It is well established that there is a persistent gender gap in promotion in academic medicine despite an equal number of male and female medical students for the past 20 years. Possible mediators of this gender gap include differences between men and women in years on faculty, measures of productivity such as number of [...]

Background: Decision fatigue describes the erosion of decision making capacity as a consequence of the repeated acts of decision making. The phenomenon has been detected in ambulatory settings with higher rates of inappropriate antimicrobial and opiate prescribing and lower rates of cancer screening associated with appointments that occur later in the day. As hospital medicine [...]