Health Equities with Limited English Proficiency: A Review of the Literature.

Health equity exists when everyone has an equal opportunity to achieve their highest level of health. Effective communication is essential to ensure a therapeutic relationship. Patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) experience communication barriers, leading to poorer outcomes.

Differences in Primary Care Follow-up After Acute Care Discharge Within and Across Health Systems: a Retrospective Cohort Study.

Background: Timely primary care follow-up after acute care discharge may improve outcomes.

Objective: To evaluate whether post-discharge follow-up rates differ among patients discharged from hospitals directly affiliated with their primary care clinic (same-site), other hospitals within their health system (same-system), and hospitals outside their health system (outside-system).

Design: Retrospective cohort study.

Decline in Prenatal Buprenorphine/Naloxone Fills during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States.

Objectives: Pregnancy provides a critical opportunity to engage individuals with opioid use disorder in care. However, before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were multiple barriers to accessing buprenorphine/naloxone during pregnancy. Care disruptions during the pandemic may have further exacerbated these existing barriers.

Association Between Restricted Abortion Access and Child Entries Into the Foster Care System.

Importance: The 2022 US Supreme Court decision Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization overturned federal protections to abortion care, allowing many states to severely restrict or ban access to abortion. Given the implications of the Dobbs ruling, there is a need to understand the full consequences of restricted abortion access. Before 2022, many states restricted access to safe and legal abortions through Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws, which provide a historical mode for estimating the consequences of abortion restrictions.

A National Survey of Stress and Burnout in Critical Care Nurses: A Prepandemic Study.

Background: Critical care nurses (CCNs) experience a higher level of stress and burnout than nurses in other specialties. Approximately 50% of CCNs are mildly stressed, and almost 20% are moderately stressed. Prolonged periods of stress can lead to burnout, which has been shown to have deleterious effects on quality and patient safety.

Evaluation of Telehealth Visit Attendance After Implementation of a Patient Navigator Program.

Importance: The dramatic rise in use of telehealth accelerated by COVID-19 created new telehealth-specific challenges as patients and clinicians adapted to technical aspects of video visits.

Objective: To evaluate a telehealth patient navigator pilot program to assist patients in overcoming barriers to video visit access.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This quality improvement study investigated visit attendance outcomes among those who received navigator outreach (intervention group) compared with those who did not (comparator group) at 2 US academic primary care clinics during a 12-week study period from April to July 2021.

Administration of Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Monoclonal Antibodies After US Food and Drug Administration Deauthorization.

This cross-sectional study uses time-series data to evaluate the administration of bamlanivimab-etesevimab and casirivimab-imdevimab monoclonal antibody treatments for SARS-CoV-2 infection after the US Food and Drug Administration deauthorized their use in early 2022.

Causal and Associational Language in Observational Health Research: A Systematic Evaluation.

We estimated the degree to which language used in the high-profile medical/public health/epidemiology literature implied causality using language linking exposures to outcomes and action recommendations; examined disconnects between language and recommendations; identified the most common linking phrases; and estimated how strongly linking phrases imply causality. We searched for and screened 1,170 articles from 18 high-profile journals (65 per journal) published from 2010-2019. Based on written framing and systematic guidance, 3 reviewers rated the degree of causality implied in abstracts and full text for exposure/outcome linking language and action recommendations.

Assessment of a Crisis Standards of Care Scoring System for Resource Prioritization and Estimated Excess Mortality by Race, Ethnicity, and Socially Vulnerable Area During a Regional Surge in COVID-19.

Importance: Crisis standards of care (CSOC) scores designed to allocate scarce resources during the COVID-19 pandemic could exacerbate racial disparities in health care.

Objective: To analyze the association of a CSOC scoring system with resource prioritization and estimated excess mortality by race, ethnicity, and residence in a socially vulnerable area.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This retrospective cohort analysis included adult patients in the intensive care unit during a regional COVID-19 surge from April 13 to May 22, 2020, at 6 hospitals in a health care network in greater Boston, Massachusetts.

Association of University Student Gatherings With Community COVID-19 Infections Before and After the NCAA March Madness Tournament.

This cross-sectional study examines the association of large celebrations at universities across the US, before and after the NCAA March Madness tournament, with COVID-19 infections in a university’s county.

Secondary Use of COVID-19 Symptom Incidence Among Hospital Employees as an Example of Syndromic Surveillance of Hospital Admissions Within 7 Days.

Importance: Alternative methods for hospital occupancy forecasting, essential information in hospital crisis planning, are necessary in a novel pandemic when traditional data sources such as disease testing are limited.

Objective: To determine whether mandatory daily employee symptom attestation data can be used as syndromic surveillance to estimate COVID-19 hospitalizations in the communities where employees live.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cohort study was conducted from April 2, 2020, to November 4, 2020, at a large academic hospital network of 10 hospitals accounting for a total of 2384 beds and 136 000 discharges in New England.

Trends in telehealth and in-person transitional care management visits during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background/objectives: Transitional care management (TCM) visits delivered following hospitalization have been associated with reductions in mortality, readmissions, and total costs; however, uptake remains low. We sought to describe trends in TCM visit delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design: Cross-sectional study of ambulatory electronic health records from December 30, 2019 and January 3, 2021.

Trends in Filled Naloxone Prescriptions Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States.

This cohort study analyzes the trends in filled naloxone prescriptions during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and compare these to opioid prescriptions and overall prescriptions.

Telehealth Use by Age and Race at a Single Academic Medical Center During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Retrospective Cohort Study.

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, many ambulatory clinics transitioned to telehealth, but it remains unknown how this may have exacerbated inequitable access to care.

Objective: Given the potential barriers faced by different populations, we investigated whether telehealth use is consistent and equitable across age, race, and gender.

Methods: Our retrospective cohort study of outpatient visits was conducted between March 2 and June 10, 2020, compared with the same time period in 2019, at a single academic health center in Boston, Massachusetts.

Reopening businesses and risk of COVID-19 transmission.

The true risk of a COVID-19 resurgence as states reopen businesses is unknown. In this paper, we used anonymized cell-phone data to quantify the potential risk of COVID-19 transmission in business establishments by building a Business Risk Index that measures transmission risk over time. The index was built using two metrics, visits per square foot and the average duration of visits, to account for both density of visits and length of time visitors linger in the business.

How the high acuity unit changes mortality in the intensive care unit: a retrospective before-and-after study.

Purpose: High acuity units (HAU) are hospital units that provide patients with more acute care and closer monitoring than a general hospital ward but are not as resource intensive as an intensive care unit (ICU). Nevertheless, the impact of opening a HAU on ICU patient outcomes remains poorly defined. We investigated how the creation of a HAU impacted patient outcomes in the ICU.

Assessment of Unintentional Duplicate Orders by Emergency Department Clinicians Before and After Implementation of a Visual Aid in the Electronic Health Record Ordering System.

Importance: Electronic health records allow teams of clinicians to simultaneously care for patients, but an unintended consequence is the potential for duplicate orders of tests and medications.

Objective: To determine whether a simple visual aid is associated with a reduction in duplicate ordering of tests and medications.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This cohort study used an interrupted time series model to analyze 184 694 consecutive patients who visited the emergency department (ED) of an academic hospital with 55 000 ED visits annually.