Background: Delirium is an acute state of brain failure marked by sudden onset of confusion, a fluctuating course, inattention, and often an abnormal level of consciousness. Delirium affects about 11-40% of the hospitalized patient population. In hospital delirium has been associated with 10-fold increased risk for death and a 3-to-5 fold increased risk for nosocomial [...]

Background: We conducted a pilot study in an acute care hospital and developed the Saga Fall Risk Model 2 (SFRM2), a fall prediction model comprising eight items: Bedriddenness rank, age, sex, emergency admission, admission to the neurosurgery department, history of falls, independence of eating, and use of hypnotics. Bedriddenness rank is an official scale of [...]

Background: High quality clinical documentation is essential for patient safety. Thoughtful clinical documentation transmits one’s clinical reasoning and is considered to be a professional responsibility. There are no accepted standards for assessing documentation with respect to clinical reasoning. We therefore undertook this study to establish a metric to evaluate hospitalists’ documentation of clinical reasoning in [...]

Background: Interventions to improve inpatient sleep rely on the ability to objectively quantify sleep; however existing methods of measurement (wrist actigraphy and patient survey) are resource intensive and impose a burden on patients. To overcome these barriers, we developed “sleep opportunity” (SLOP), a surrogate metric for sleep derived solely from the electronic health record (EHR). [...]

Background: Although 88% of inpatients with falls do not sustain injuries, those with fall-related injuries experience limitations in activities of daily living, residual disabilities, and additional medical costs. Therefore, predicting fall-related injuries is crucial. We previously developed a prediction model for fall-related injuries, the Saga Fall Injury Risk Model (SFIRM), in an acute care hospital [...]

Background: Acute heart failure exacerbations are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality and are associated with high rates of hospital admissions and healthcare expenditure. As part of a broader effort to improve heart failure care at our hospital, this project aims to characterize heart failure type prevalence, mortality, and readmission rates to benchmark against [...]

Background: Delirium, an acute neuropsychiatric syndrome marked by fluctuating disturbances in attention, cognition, and consciousness, is prevalent among older hospitalized cancer patients. The Mayo Delirium Prediction (MDP) tool, designed to predict delirium risk in older adults using electronic health record (EHR) data, may help identify individuals at increased risk, thus offering valuable insights for targeted [...]