Background: Healthcare disparities have existed for decades, yet it took a global pandemic to put this emergency into the spotlight. The Joint Commission states “health related social needs” (HRSN) are the root cause of many disparities. HRSN encompasses a wide spectrum including inability to pay bills, poor access to transportation, and lack of housing. At [...]

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: Healthcare disparities have existed for decades, yet it took a global pandemic to put this emergency into the spotlight. The Joint Commission states “health related social needs” (HRSN) are the root cause of many disparities. HRSN encompasses a wide spectrum including inability to pay bills, poor access to transportation, and lack of housing. At [...]

Background: Team-based approaches have been broadly promoted to improve healthcare delivery in the U.S. However, few studies have analyzed the complexities of team-based communication in the current healthcare delivery landscape of increasing electronic health record (EHR) use and the rapidly evolving EHR functionalities. Major hurdles to studying effective communication within and between healthcare teams include: [...]

Background: Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems are broadly used to support the delivery of patient care and to facilitate communication and coordination among providers.  The use of EHR has been demonstrated to improve health care quality and efficiency. However, the impact of how providers utilize EHRs and communicate information in care delivery remains unclear. Specifically, how do [...]

Background: Recognizing the significant effect that social factors have on health outcomes, national stakeholders have developed policies requiring healthcare organizations to identify and address health-related social needs (HRSN). However, the effectiveness of HRSN screening strategies remains unclear. Notably, policymakers provide minimal guidance on how screening should be conducted and allow hospitals to use self-selected screening [...]

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: Rounds are critical for facilitating patient care, supporting interprofessional communication and providing education for trainees (1,2). Social distancing requirements in the era of COVID led to significant changes to the traditional rounding structure (3). The impact of these changes on patient care, interprofessional communication and education remain unknown. Methods: An interprofessional needs assessment was [...]

Background: Efforts have been made to increase social determinants of health (SDoH) screening to connect patients and families to community-based organizations (CBOs) and other resources. Tracking closed loop referrals is one potential measure to assist in assessing whether the resulting referrals and interventions have affected the child’s SDoH or improved the family’s well-being. Our team [...]

Background: In the acute care environment, healthcare workers interface with patients who have limited access to medical care and a high prevalence of social determinants of health (SDoH) barriers.1 The inpatient setting presents a key intervention point where the social needs of vulnerable populations might be addressed. Standard inpatient medicine care teams, however, lack the [...]