“Harper’s Index” of Hospital Medicine 2018

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By  |  May 14, 2018 | 

Harper’s Magazine dates back to 1850, and their monthly list of statistics started in 1984. After attending SHM’s annual conference last month, I thought I’d present a few of my favorite pearls similar to the Harper’s Index each month in their magazine.

  1. % of Medicare patients discharged with an opiate prescription: 14%
  2. % of those pts still on an opiate 90 days later: 42%
  3. % of opiate prescriptions worldwide that are written in the US: 80%
  4. % of the US population compared to the world: 5%
  5. Number of opioid-related deaths in the US in 2016: 64,000
  6. Number of opioid-related deaths in the US in 1999: 19,000
  7. NNT for a single dose of gabapentin 250mg to improve postoperative pain by 50%: 11
  8. NNT for NSAIDs to achieve 50% pain relief: 3
  9. % of patients with acute delirium in the ICU who have an abnormal CT: 21%
  10. % of patients with unexplained delirium in the ICU who have an abnormal EEG: 19%
  11. Unknown case presentations at SHM with a diagnosis of ictal asystole: 1
  12. Chance that I’ve heard of that diagnosis before: 0%
  13. Percentage of diagnoses in medicine that are wrong: 15
  14. Presentations at SHM that involved a Netflix crew filming a documentary: 1
  15. % of US drivers who rate themselves as above average: 80%
  16. % of those drivers who live in Florida: 100%
  17. Year that NEJM began doing CPC: 1924
  18. NNT for ICU patients with LR as compared to NS to prevent 1 death, renal dysfunction, or needs for renal replacement therapy: 94
  19. % of hospitalists upset that they now must admit to their surgical colleagues that they were right to use LR all along: 100%
  20. GFR above which a contrasted CT is likely safe: 30
  21. Number of radiologists who will now perform that CT chest PE protocol for you when the Cr is 2, GFR 45: 0
  22. Number of CXRs that would equal the radiation of one Chest CT PE protocol: 800
  23. % of patients with a preadmit GFR >90 who develop AKI in the hospital requiring HD who recover off HD: >99%
  24. % of patients with preadmit GFR 30-44 who develop AKI in the hospital requiring HD who recover off HD: 58%
  25. % of hospitalists who thought when Larry Wellikson mentioned micro hospitals in his key note where picturing little, tiny hospitals: 25
  26. 30-day mortality for patients in the ER with a nonischemic ECG and normal high sensitive troponin: 0
  27. % of ER doctors who will now discharge that patient home after you both discuss that study: 0
  28. Odds that a published RCT will see a subsequent RCT with findings that reverse or lessen the initial claim: 32%
  29. Number of restaurants at Marriott World Center Orlando: 5
  30. Number of those restaurants on the first night of the conference with a wait time of 3 hours: 5
  31. % of talks that had at least 1 slide where the data table wasn’t visible from the back of the room: 50%
  32. % of guests at the Marriot World Center who thought the laser show at the pool was pretty cool on the first night as the lasers seemed to appear in your hotel room: 90%
  33. % of guests that wanted the laser show to shut off before it started by the last night: 90%
  34. Chances I’ll be in National Harbor for HM19: 100%

Did you attend HM18? Post a comment with your favorite conference pearl.

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About the Author: Jordan Messler

Jordan Messler, MD is the Executive Director, Quality Initiatives at Glytec and works as a hospitalist at Morton Plant Hospitalist group in Clearwater, Florida. He is also serves as the Physician Blog Editor of The Hospital Leader blog. He previously chaired SHM’s Quality and Patient Safety Committee. In addition, he’s been active in several SHM mentoring programs, including Project BOOST and Glycemic Control. He went to medical school at University of South Florida, in Tampa and completed his residency at Emory University. He recognizes the challenges of working in a hospital that lines the intracostal waterways of a spring break mecca and requests that if you want to be selected as a mentored site, you will have a similar location with palm trees and coastline nearby. He tries to find time to sit on the beach with his family to escape the hospital’s miasma. While there, he looks forward to reading about the history of hospitals/medicine, and how it relates to quality. But inevitably, he will have his daughter dumping sand on him and then has to explain to his wife why their daughter is buried up to her neck.

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