Background: Joint physician-nurse rounding is an important best practice that facilitates communication and patient participation in their care while improving outcomes and satisfaction. Interdisciplinary bedside rounding has been shown to reduce mortality, lengths of stay, medication errors, and readmissions while improving staff engagement, teamwork, and patient experience (1, 2, 3). In 2018, our hospital added [...]

Background: Clinical documentation integrity (CDI), a process by which documentation is optimized to be both congruent with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) terminology and reflect patient severity of illness, is widely used in healthcare to ensure appropriate coding for hospital reimbursement and improve accuracy of research and quality outcomes. CDI optimization is often performed [...]

Background: To date, there are limited reports around the use of well-designed information technology tools to enhance throughput communication during interdisciplinary rounds (IDRs). In collaboration with our technology innovations center, we developed a Microsoft Teams IDR tool known as “NORA.” NORA is an automated process-oriented tool designed to extract patient summary information from electronic health [...]

Background: Healthcare expenditures in the US have been increasing at an unsustainable rate, and thus there is a strong interest in resource stewardship of low-value diagnostic tests. At our institution, internal data, as well as The Vizient™ Clinical Data Base, showed high utilization of inpatient daily labs (complete blood count (CBC), basic metabolic panel (BMP) [...]

Background: Sepsis is a major cause of mortality in hospitalized patients, and early treatment is critical to survival. However, there is a paucity of research on methods to assist real-time clinical decision-making for sepsis treatment. Utilizing data on patients who had sepsis in the ICU, we propose a novel data-driven framework for recommending treatments by [...]

Background: The physical exam for heart failure can be limited by poor reproducibility, lack of specificity, provider inexperience, or patient habitus. To estimate the JVP or HJR requires identifying the internal jugular vein (IJV). Finding the IJV can be limited by those factors but the addition of ultrasound can improve its identification. Ultrasound can therefore [...]

Background: Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots, like ChatGPT (from Open-AI), have received widespread attention in the last year for their ability to process large amounts of text data and produce human-like script responses on a wide array of topics. In particular, LLM chatbots have performed well in areas of patient communication, whether it’s answering cardiovascular [...]

Background: Many electronic health record (EHRs) systems offer secure messaging which allows for asynchronous, text message-based communication. Increasingly electronic messaging is replacing more traditional methods of communication such as paging, yet there is limited research on the impact of this transition. Studies have shown that healthcare workers find text communication to be more efficient than [...]

Background: Heart failure (HF) hospital readmissions are a leading cause of US 30-day hospital readmissions. Factors related to clinical complexity and unmet social needs are among the key drivers associated with HF negative clinical outcomes. Digital platforms have shown promise in improving HF outcomes but limitations like patient lack of familiarity with technology and unmet [...]

Background: eHealth interventions provide opportunities to enhance asthma or COPD self-management, though eHealth literacy (eHL) needs to be evaluated in this population. We evaluated the association between eHL and self-efficacy, as well as the willingness to use eHealth applications in patients hospitalized for chronic lung diseases (i.e., asthma and COPD). Methods: This cross-sectional observational study [...]