Background: Patients hospitalized with COVID-19 can clinically deteriorate in the second week of illness after a period of initial stability. Thus, an important clinical question is determining when it is safe to discharge these patients from the hospital without overwhelming hospitals’ capacities. Unfortunately, discharge criteria for COVID-19 patients are often based on expert opinion, with [...]

Background: Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is the leading cause of preventable hospital death. National guidelinesrecommend VTE prophylaxis for all medical patients not at low risk. Several VTE risk prediction models have been developed, but no US models have been validated in a medical population. The ACCP recommends use of the Padua risk assessment model with a [...]

Background: The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) instituted the Readmissions Reduction Program to incentivize improvements in care transitions for patients with several common and serious illnesses, including heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, pneumonia, and more recently COPD exacerbations. The HOSPITAL score has been shown to accurately identify medical patients at high-risk for 30-day [...]

Background: Early risk stratification scores utilizing data available at the bedside have been used regularly to identify patients at greatest risk of poor outcomes from rapidly evolving conditions like sepsis. Little is known about how point-of-care scores developed for sepsis perform at predicting outcomes in large, heterogeneous cohorts of patients with COVID-19. Our objective was [...]

Background: Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is the leading cause of preventable hospital death. National guidelinesrecommend VTE prophylaxis for all medical patients not at low risk. Several VTE risk prediction models have been developed, but no US models have been validated in a medical population. The ACCP recommends use of the Padua risk assessment model with a [...]

Background: The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) instituted the Readmissions Reduction Program to incentivize improvements in care transitions for patients with several common and serious illnesses, including heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, pneumonia, and more recently COPD exacerbations. The HOSPITAL score has been shown to accurately identify medical patients at high-risk for 30-day [...]

Background: Assessing severity of illness using available electronic medical record (EMR) data on admission and predicting inpatient mortality is very challenging. Lacking standardized practices around end of life issues, hospitalists use their clinical judgment in making these crucial decisions. Prolonged discussions may be needed in medically complex patients to direct an optimal plan of care [...]

Background: The 2014 ACC/AHA Perioperative Guidelines suggest using the Revised Cardiac Risk Index (RCRI), myocardial infarction or cardiac arrest (MICA), or American College of Surgeons (ACS)-NSQIP calculators for combined patient-surgical risk assessment. Alrezk and colleagues recently published a new geriatric-sensitive cardiac risk index (GS-CRI) to predict MI or cardiac arrest in the geriatric population. We [...]

Background: Risk of having a major adverse cardiac event in the perioperative period is known to be raised among those with underlying cardiovascular disease undergoing noncardiac surgery. ACC/AHA 2014 guideline is an excellent tool for the physicians to evaluate perioperative cardiac risk. However, the evidence-based set of algorithms are often under- or inappropriately utilized due [...]

Background: CDC guidelines recommend and promote public awareness for Hepatitis C virus (HCV) screening for baby boomers (1945-1965) and individuals who report risk factors such as IDU. These strict guidelines and targeted educated are hindering positive patients who are non- baby boomers without risk factors from entering care due to the lack of education for [...]