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: There are few hospitalist-specific training supports for writing clinical vignettes and case reports. This can limit participation in academic scholarship and opportunities to share informative cases encountered in everyday practice. Efforts to build hospitalists’ scholarly writing capacity—particularly for junior faculty—must effectively counter modifiable barriers including perceived lack of knowledge and ability. Purpose: Our Division [...]

Background: The Palo Alto VA Hospital has an interdisciplinary Clinical Command Center (C3) that includes “Flow” nurse practitioners (NPs) who work closely with case management, social work and primary medical teams to identify and address barriers to care and assist in discharge planning and coordination. We have created a novel collaboration between a C3 Flow [...]

Background: Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious and prevalent public health issue associated with increased healthcare utilization and worse healthcare outcomes. The majority of IPV outcomes research is conducted in emergency and outpatient populations. Our study aims to investigate how IPV exposure affects hospitalization rates and outcomes in adult patients. Methods: We performed a [...]

Background: Writing and presenting case reports provides opportunity for scholarly activities and promotes scientific writing and critical thinking. This study assesses Internal Medicine residents’ perceived benefits, challenges, and barriers regarding writing and presenting case reports. Methods: A Qualtrics survey was emailed to total 125 Internal Medicine Residents of the Medical College of Wisconsin. The survey [...]

Background: Care of complex patients are a daily challenge in the hospital setting, with a direct impact on the health care costs. Although there is no standard definition of a “complex” patient, we can argue that they are patients who need more time and resources during their care process. Age and comorbidities are probably important [...]

Background: Adequate documentation of patient diagnoses is essential for hospitals to capture the extent of services provided, to submit bills, and ultimately receive payment. These diagnoses are used to calculate hospital performance as part of the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program. Diagnoses taken from medical record documentation are also used to place patients in diagnosis-related groups [...]

Background: Patients who are frequently admitted to Medicine inpatient services comprise a distinct subset of readmitted patients about whom not much is known. A prior study collected data on characteristics of 153 frequently hospitalized patients. This was a follow-up evaluation to determine the categories of patients the original cohort belonged to, and to collect mortality [...]

Background: Diagnostic errors have been cited as a potential contributor to hospital readmissions, particularly early readmissions (e.g. within 7 days). A single prior study of early readmissions applied a binary (yes/no) metric to assess for diagnostic error in early readmissions, but this may be an insensitive method. Past studies of diagnostic error in primary care [...]

Background: Little is known about the economic value of quality improvement (QI) interventions, including those related to central-line-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI) and catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI). Methods: We searched MEDLINE, Econlit, the Centre for Reviews & Dissemination Economic Evaluations, Greylit, and Worldcat from January 1, 2004 to May 15, 2015; examined lists of references; [...]