Use of prognostic tools in the hospital, assessment of factors behind their use or lack thereof through a physician-oriented survey.

Physician's use of prognostic tools may help to decide on the intensity of therapies provided and communicate with patients and their caregivers in a timely fashion. However, literature that describes knowledge, perceived limitations and overall use of these tools by doctors is lacking. By way of a physician survey, we attempted to look at the use of prognostic tools in our community of doctors in our department of internal medicine.

Comfort measures only: agreeing on a common definition through a survey.

Despite how frequently we say "comfort measures only" (CMO) in the hospital setting, review of the medical literature yields poor representation and definition of the term. Through a survey in our hospital center, we aimed at understanding what doctors understand as CMO. A total of 176 physicians responded to the survey.