Journal of hospital medicine : an official publication of the Society of Hospital Medicine
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Limited English proficiency (LEP) has been implicated in poor health outcomes. Sepsis is a frequently fatal syndrome that is commonly encountered in hospital medicine. The impact of LEP on sepsis mortality is not currently known. ⋯ In a single-center study of patients hospitalized with sepsis, LEP was associated with mortality across nearly all races. This is a novel finding that will require further exploration into the causal nature of this association.
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Veterans with healthcare needs utilize both Veterans Health Administration (VA) and non-VA hospitals. These dual-use veterans are at high risk of adverse outcomes due to the lack of coordination for safe transitions. ⋯ All participants perceived the current transition-of-care process across healthcare systems to be inefficient. Efforts to improve quality and safety in transitional care should address the challenges clinicians and patients experience when transitioning from non-VA hospitals to VA primary care.
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Prior studies of stress cardiomyopathy (SCM) have used International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes to identify patients in administrative databases without evaluating the validity of these codes. Between 2010 and 2016, we identified 592 patients discharged with a first known principal or secondary ICD code for SCM in our medical system. ⋯ These findings suggest that, although all but a few hospitalized patients with an ICD code for SCM had a diagnosis of SCM, some of these were chronic cases, and numerous patients with a new diagnosis of SCM did not undergo a complete diagnostic workup. Researchers should be mindful of these limitations in future studies involving administrative databases.