Journal of hospital medicine : an official publication of the Society of Hospital Medicine
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To assist busy hospital medicine clinicians, we summarized 10 impactful articles from last year. The authors reviewed articles published between March 2018-April 2019 for the Hospital Medicine Updates at the Society of Hospital Medicine and the Society of General Internal Medicine Annual Meetings. The authors voted to select 10 of 30 presented articles based on quality and clinical impact for this summary. The key findings include: (1) Vancomycin or fidaxomicin are the first-line treatment for initial Clostridioides difficile infection; (2) Unnecessary supplemental oxygen is linked to increased mortality; aim for a target oxygen saturation of 90%-94% in most hospitalized patients; (3) Stigmatizing language in medical records impacts physician trainees' attitudes and pain management practices; (4) Consider ablation for atrial fibrillation in patients with heart failure; (5) Patients with opioid use disorder should be offered buprenorphine or methadone therapy; (6) Apixaban is safe and may be preferable over warfarin in patients with atrial fibrillation and end-stage kidney disease; (7) It is probably safe to discontinue antimethicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) coverage in patients with hospital-acquired pneumonia who are improving and have negative cultures; (8) Selected patients with left-sided endocarditis (excluding MRSA) may switch from intravenous (IV) to oral antibiotics if they are clinically stable after 10 days; (9) Oral antibiotics may be equivalent to IV antibiotics in patients with joint and soft tissue infections; (10) A history-electrocardiogram-age-risk factors-troponin (HEART) score ≥4 is a reliable threshold for determining the patients who are at risk for short-term major adverse cardiac events and may warrant further evaluation.
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Why is this important?
Buprenorphine (Subutex, Tamgesic, Suboxone, Norspan) is a partial opioid agonist with high mu-receptor affinity, though limited by a ceiling effect. Because of its favourable safety profile it is used for opioid dependence, chronic and, increasingly, acute pain.1
Patients historically often have regular buprenorphine (BUP) ceased post-operatively when needing opioid analgesia. It was assumed that because of it’s high mu-receptor affinity, BUP blocks the efficacy of additional opioid analgesics. In reality, ceasing buprenorphine creates more complexity and may precipitate acute withdrawal.
Be smart
Haber, DeFries & Martin point out that despite the high receptor affinity of BUP, there are still additional receptors remaining for full-agonist opioids to bind and activate. This is supported by the literature (Kornfeld 2010 & Harrison 2018). Even in the post-operative period buprenorphine can be easily continued, although with patients sometimes needing higher doses of acute opioid analgesics (Goel 2019 & Hansen 2016).
“Temporarily discontinuing buprenorphine introduces unnecessary complexity to a hospitalization, places the patient at risk of exacerbation of pain, opioid withdrawal...“
Bottom-line
If buprenorphine is regularly being taken then it should not be ceased for hospital admission. Additional short-acting opioids can be added if needed. Doses required may be higher, but this is primarily due to opioid tolerance rather than receptor competition with BUP. Alternatively, a maintenance BUP dose can be split into 3-4 divided doses and/or increased to cover acute analgesic needs.
summary
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Buprenorphine is also a kappa and delta receptor antagonist, a weak partial NOP/Nociceptin receptor agonist, and has potent local anaesthetic effects. It behaves as a full agonist for analgesia in the opioid-naive, but a partial agonist for respiratory depression. ↩
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When ultrasound equipment is available, along with providers who are appropriately trained to use it, we recommend that ultrasound guidance should be used for site selection of lumbar puncture to reduce the number of needle insertion attempts and needle redirections and increase the overall procedure success rates, especially in patients who are obese or have difficult-to-palpate landmarks. We recommend that ultrasound should be used to more accurately identify the lumbar spine level than physical examination in both obese and nonobese patients. We suggest using ultrasound for selecting and marking a needle insertion site just before performing lumbar puncture in either a lateral decubitus or sitting position. ⋯ We recommend that novices should undergo simulation-based training, where available, before attempting ultrasound-guided lumbar puncture on actual patients. We recommend that training in ultrasound-guided lumbar puncture should be adapted based on prior ultrasound experience, as learning curves will vary. We recommend that novice providers should be supervised when performing ultrasound-guided lumbar puncture before performing the procedure independently on patients.
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It is unclear which medication reconciliation interventions are most effective at reducing inpatient medication discrepancies. Five United States hospitals' interdisciplinary quality improvement (QI) teams were virtually mentored by QI-trained physicians. Sites implemented one to seven evidence-based interventions in 791 patients during the 25-month implementation period. ⋯ Hospitals should focus first on hiring and training pharmacy staff to assist with medication reconciliation at discharge and delineating roles and responsibilities of clinical staff. We caution hospitals implementing a large vendor EHR, as medication discrepancies may increase. Finally, the effect of medication history training on discrepancies needs further study.