Articles related to Hospitalist

The pandemic forced hospitals to quickly become more flexible. They were challenged to find ways to invent new space for ICUs and ERs within existing facilities. Virtual critical care and virtual specialty care were implemented. Outside spaces were re-envisioned for clinical purposes and physicians and other HCPs were to reimage and expand care space within the hospital walls.

The median time to recovery in a group of 1,800 vaccinated and unvaccinated adults (median age: 48 years) was essentially the same whether the patients received ivermectin or placebo: 12 and 13 days, respectively. Death rate was slightly higher in the ivermectin group and rates of pneumonia and VTE were slightly higher in the placebo group.

This study of 2,500 adults receiving mechanical ventilation randomized 1/3 were assigned to an exigent saturation target pf 90%, 1/3 to a target of 94%, and 1/3 to a target of 98%. The median number of ventilator-free days was 20, 21, and 21 for the three target groups, respectively. In-hospital death by day 28 was 34.8%, 34.0%, and 33.2% for the three groups, respectively.

According to new information revealed in a study of the AHA’s COVID-19 Cardiovascular Disease Registry, new onset AFib occurs in 5% of patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Patients who developed new-onset AFib experienced longer hospital stays and approximately 45% died during their hospitalization. Atrial fibrillation can directly increase the risk of stroke and prolong hospitalization. It is also an indirect marker of the insult that the heart is experiencing when patients are infected with COVID-19.

In a cohort study of more than 2 million patients, influenza vaccination was associated with a 22% to 24% lower risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection. But more than half of that effect seems to be that healthier people are more likely to be vaccinated for flu.

In this retrospective cross-sectional study of patients hospitalized for suspected infection, temporal temperature measurement was associated with a lower odds of detecting fever compared with oral measurement in Black patients but not white patients. “Health care systems routinely use fever cutoffs to trigger notification pathways such as sepsis alerts to systematize timely triage and antibiotic administration. Although the absolute difference between oral and temporal temperatures was small, the findings suggest that this discrepancy combined with commonly used fever cutoffs may lead to fever going undetected in many Black patient.” Sivasubramanium V. Bhavani, MD