Background: Structured mortality review can help identify care issues and focus quality efforts, but existing methods have limitations. In the Department of Medicine at UCLA, we developed a novel in-person, near real-time, interdisciplinary rapid mortality review (RMR) process to capture the insight of frontline providers and improve care. In this study, we compare the yield [...]

Background: Structured mortality review can help identify care issues and focus quality efforts, but existing methods have limitations. In the Department of Medicine at UCLA, we developed a novel in-person, near real-time, interdisciplinary rapid mortality review (RMR) process to capture the insight of frontline providers and improve care. In this study, we compare the yield [...]

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: There is a significant impact of influenza on the individuals, families, and societies, both economically and clinically, in terms of hospital admissions, medication expenses and side effects, secondary bacterial infections and more days off from work or other forms of reduced productivity for the patients or their caretakers. Our objective is to present the [...]

Background:  Transitions of care, whether between or within institutions, are an important source of errors, inefficiency, and unnecessary costs.  Inter-hospital transfers are complicated by incongruent information systems, indirect and asynchronous communication, and geographical distance all in settings of high patient complexity and acuity.  We developed a large database of patients transferred between hospitals to identify [...]

Background: The 2016 Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines recommend antibiotic administration within 1 hour of emergency department (ED) presentation for patients with sepsis. While early antibiotics are associated with reduced mortality, the 1 hr policy has been criticized for its one-size-fits-all approach and risk for over-diagnosis and treatment. Clinicians and quality leaders have called, instead, for [...]

Background: Several electronic health record (EHR) mortality prediction models have been developed to promote early goals of care discussions (GOCD) but only a few models were evaluated prospectively. We aimed to implement a real-time 30-day inpatient mortality prediction model previously developed at our facility and evaluate its effect on GOCD in seriously ill transferred patients. [...]

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 [...]