Impact of localizing general medical teams to a single nursing unit.

Background: Localization of general medical inpatient teams is an attractive way to improve inpatient care but has not been adequately studied.

Objective: To evaluate the impact of localizing general medical teams to a single nursing unit.

Design: Quasi-experimental study using historical and concurrent controls.

A comparison of outcomes of general medical inpatient care provided by a hospitalist-physician assistant model vs a traditional resident-based model.

Background: Residency reform in the form of work hour restrictions has forced academic medical centers to develop alternate models of care to provide inpatient care. One such model is the use of physician assistants (PAs) with hospitalists. However, these models of care have not been widely evaluated.

Pregnancy and short-coupled torsades de pointes.

This 24-year-old woman had incessant polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (PVT) during week 24 of her pregnancy and received over 200 implantable cardioverter-defibrillator discharges. She failed to respond to quinidine, magnesium, isoproterenol, amiodarone, esmolol, and cilostazol during her PVT storm, although her dramatic response to verapamil was consistent with the diagnosis of short-coupled variant of torsades de pointes. The case illustrated the utility of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation during refractory PVT, while attempting diagnostic and therapeutic pharmacologic maneuvers.

It's the writing on the wall: Whiteboards improve inpatient satisfaction with provider communication.

Although keeping patients informed is a part of quality hospital care, inpatients often report they are not well informed. The authors placed whiteboards in each patient room on medicine wards in their hospital and asked nurses and physicians to use them to improve communication with inpatients. The authors then examined the effect of these whiteboards by comparing satisfaction with communication of patients discharged from medical wards before and after whiteboards were placed to satisfaction with communication of patients from surgical wards that did not have whiteboards.