Working with a team of clinicians and informaticists, IHQSE Director Dr. Jeff Glasheen helped create and implement an EHR-driven tool that accurately predicts inpatient mortality. The tool, using real-time data from Epic, provides a highly predictive mortality score that is updated every 15 minutes across a 12-hospital health system. Tested on over 80,000 patients, the tool was developed to aid decision making in scarce resource situations, such as COVID-19 ventilator shortages.

IHQSE Faculty member, Emily Gottenborg, MD, and her colleague, Amy Yu, MD, are first authors on an article about the pandemic's impact on personal and professional activities of healthcare providers. They suggest solutions to help mitigate the impact, such as continuing alternate and flexible work schedules, developing flexible promotion timelines, investing in family support mechanisms, creating social support networks, and addressing gender pay disparities.

Ninety percent of patients labeled as penicillin allergic are tolerant to the medication, yet those labeled as allergic have longer hospital stays, increased exposure to suboptimal antibiotics, and an increased risk of methicillin-resistant infections. Through several quality improvement interventions, including development of a multidisciplinary clinical care pathway, workflow optimization, and education sessions, a team from Children’s Hospital Colorado successfully increased the rate of penicillin allergy delabeling among low-risk hospitalized pediatric patients. Led by Certificate Training Program graduates Drs. Maureen Egan Bauer and Kirstin Carel, Christine MacBrayne, PharmD, and Amy Stein, CPNP, this work allowed for increased use of optimal antibiotics.

Dr. Emily Gottenborg, IHQSE faculty member and Director of the Introductory Training Program, was the lead author on a seminal paper understanding the experiences of women in leadership roles in hospital medicine. Her team highlighted four limiting challenges including lack of leadership training, bullying, a need to sacrifice to achieve balance and the need for personal and professional validation. Key interventions to address these issues were also shared.