Background: Hyperglycemia at the time of hospital admission has been associated with poor outcomes in several patient groups, but there is little information about this association in hospitalized patients with diverse diagnoses. Methods: We identified all adult patients admitted between 10/1/2015 and 9/30/2016 who had glucose levels measured during the first 24 h after admission to the hospital. Clinical information included age, gender, glucose levels, diagnoses based on ICD 10 discharge coding, length of stay (LOS), and mortality. Patients were classified into quartiles based on glucose levels and into clinically relevant glucose categories. Results: This study included 18,478 adult patients admitted to a tertiary care hospital. The median age was 53 years, the median LOS was 4 days, and the overall in-hospital mortality was 3.8%. The median admission glucose level was 117 mg/dL. Mortality increased in each glucose quartile; it was also highest in patients admitted with a glucose <55 mg/dL or with a glucose >200 mg/dL. The LOS was significantly shorter in patients in glucose quartiles 1 and 2. Conclusions: Admission glucose levels were associated with in-hospital mortality and LOS in this cohort of hospitalized patients. Attention to glucose levels can help identify patients at risk for poor outcomes.

Physician burnout has increasingly been recognized as a multifactorial issue leading to detrimental outcomes for both the physician and patients being treated. Burnout is defined as “a pathological syndrome in which emotional depletion and maladaptive detachment develop in response to prolonged occupational stress”.  It has been proven that poor work-life balance (WBL), a state in which personal and professional life are in a state of imbalance, is  connected to burnout. Upwards of 61% of all U.S. physicians are dissatisfied with their WBL. Burnout rates among physicians are correlated with frequency of work-home conflicts leading to greater dissatisfaction of their WLB. With the prevalence of burnout among US physicians ranging between 34-76%, addressing modifiable causes such as optimizing WLB should be a priority for administrators. In this systematic review, we explore the importance of creating schedules that prioritize protecting physicians’ WLB as a means to decrease burnout and the associated sequelae including medical errors, alcohol abuse, and depression. After identifying 202 studies through PubMed; data from 21 articles published between 2011-2017 were analyzed. We found that schedules that emphasize the following were protective of physician WBL: <70-hour work week goals, a maximum of one on-call night per five consecutive days, providing physicians with schedule information one month in advance, limiting the consecutive work days to five and providing vacation time. As the importance of mental health, and wellness within the health care setting are being regarded as a cause of concern, it is apparent that positive changes need to be made.

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Background: Cardiac troponins I and T are highly sensitive and specific markers for acute myocardial infarction (AMI). However, a wide range of non-AMI conditions can also cause significant elevations in cardiac troponins. Given the deleterious impact of misdiagnosis of AMI, the ability to risk-stratify patients who present with an elevated troponin is paramount. We hypothesized that the maximum troponin level would be more predictive of mortality and the diagnosis of AMI than the initial troponin level or change in troponin level. Methods: Patient records from a 9-hospital system (n=30,173) in Texas were reviewed during a 24-month period in 2016-2017. Data collected for patients aged ࣙ40 years included International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision diagnoses, troponin I, demographic data (age, sex, smoking history, and chronic medical conditions), and death during hospitalization. We used logistic regression with the Firth penalized likelihood approach to determine the predictive ability of initial, maximum, and change in troponin level for mortality and the diagnosis of AMI. Results: Demographic characteristics of our cohort included a median age of 70 years, with 48.05% male and 51.95% female. The most common preexisting risk factor was hypertension in 78.81% of the cohort. Notable findings from the logistic regression include the predictive ability of maximum troponin on the odds of death by 0.7% for each unit of increase in troponin value. Also, the odds of AMI increased by 3.1% for each unit of increase in the maximum troponin value. Conclusion: Regardless of the level, a detectable amount of troponin in the serum results in a significantly elevated risk of mortality. Many patients with elevated troponin levels leave the hospital without a specific diagnosis, which can lead to poor outcomes because a detectable troponin does not represent a no-risk population. Our study demonstrates that maximum troponin level is a more sensitive and specific predictor of mortality than initial or change in troponin. Similarly, maximum troponin is the most predictive of AMI vs other causes of troponin elevation, likely because of the correlation between rising troponin levels and cardiomyocyte damage. Further studies are needed to correlate maximum troponin levels and clinical manifestations, which may be helpful in redefining AMI so that AMI can be distinguished more easily from non-AMI diagnoses.