Background: Specialty wards (e.g., cardiology or oncology wards) group clinically similar hospitalized patients in efforts to improve outcomes and costs. When these wards exceed capacity, subsequent patients overflow to “geographically dispersed” alternate wards. Geographic dispersion has been associated with care inefficiency and worse outcomes on specialty wards, but has not been studied in a large, [...]

Background: Sepsis is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in hospitalized patients . Early and appropriate therapy has been shown to improve outcomes, making early diagnosis and intervention critical . However, recognition and treatment of sepsis remains a challenge . In order to understand how to best deliver sepsis treatment in different hospitals within [...]

Background: One in three heavy drinkers experience acute alcohol-associated hepatitis (AAH). AAH is defined as acute liver injury with elevated bilirubin and AST/ALT ratio >1.5 in the setting of heavy alcohol use. AAH has a high mortality rate and is associated with development of chronic liver disease; thus, it is crucial to correctly identify patients [...]

Background: As the day progresses, clinicians may experience decision fatigue that impairs clinical reasoning. Such impairment may exert its greatest effects on clinicians’ abilities to identify and effectively treat heterogeneous clinical syndromes with high diagnostic uncertainty, including sepsis. We therefore examined the association of time of day with antibiotic initiation among hospitalized ward patients with [...]