Readmission prevention is paramount for hospitals and, by extension, hospitalist programs. Hospitalists see early and reliable outpatient follow-up as a safe landing for their most complicated patient cases. The option of a postdischarge clinic arises from the challenge to arrange adequate postdischarge care for patients who lack easy access because of insurance or provider availability. Guaranteeing postdischarge access by opening a dedicated, hospitalist-led postdischarge clinic appears to be an easy solution, but it is a solution that requires significant investment (including investment in physician and staff training and administrative support) and careful navigation of existing primary care relationships. In addition, a clinic staffed only with physicians may not be well equipped to address the complex social factors in healthcare utilization and readmission. Better understanding of the evidence supporting post discharge physician visits, several models of clinics, and the key operational questions are essential to address before crossing the inpatient-outpatient divide.

A postdischarge outpatient provider visit is often seen as a key factor in reducing readmissions. In 2013, Medicare added strength to this association by establishing transitional care management codes, which provide enhanced reimbursement to providers for a visit within 7 or 14 days of discharge, with focused attention on transitional issues.¹ However, whether a postdischarge visit reduces readmissions remains unclear. Given evidence that higher primary care density is associated with lower healthcare utilization,² CMS’s financial investment in incentivizing post discharge physician visits may be a good bet. On the other hand, simply having a primary care physician (PCP) may be a risk factor for readmission. This association suggests that postdischarge vigilance leads to identification of medical problems that lead to rehospitalization.³ This uncertainty is not resolved in systematic reviews of readmission reduction initiatives, which were not focused solely on the impact of a physician visit.^4,5

The earliest study of postdischarge visits in a general medical population found an association between intensive outpatient follow-up by new providers in a Veterans Affairs population and an increase in hospital readmissions.⁶ This model is similar to some hospitalist models for postdischarge clinics, as the visit was with a noncontinuity provider. The largest recent study, of patients hospitalized with acute myocardial infarction, community-acquired pneumonia, or congestive heart failure (CHF) between 2009 and 2012, found increased frequency of postdischarge follow-up but no concomitant reduction in readmissions.⁷ Although small observational studies⁸ have found a postdischarge primary care visit may reduce the risk for readmission in general medical patients, the bulk of the recent data is negative.

In high-risk patients, however, there may be a clear benefit to postdischarge follow-up. In a North Carolina Medicaid population, a physician visit after discharge was associated with fewer readmissions among high-risk patients, but not among lower risk patients, whose readmission rates were low to start.⁹ The results of that study support the idea that risk stratification may identify patients who can benefit from more intensive outpatient follow-up. In general medical populations, existing studies may suffer from an absence of adequate risk assessment.

The evidence in specific disease states may show a clearer association between a postdischarge physician visit and reduced risk for readmission. One quarter of patients with CHF are rehospitalized within 30 days of discharge.¹⁰ In this disease with frequent exacerbations, a clinic visit to monitor volume status, weight, and medication adherence might reduce the frequency of readmissions or prolong the interval between rehospitalizations. A large observational study observed that earlier post discharge follow up by a cardiologist or a PCP was associated with lower risk of readmission, but only in the quintile with the closest follow-up. In addition, fewer than 40% of patients in this group had a visit within 7 days.¹¹ In another heart failure population, follow-up with either a PCP or cardiologist within 7 days of discharge was again associated with lower risk for readmission.¹² Thus, data suggest a protective effect of postdischarge visits in CHF patients, in contrast to a general medical population. Patients with end-stage renal disease may also fit in this group protected by a postdischarge physician visit, as 1 additional visit within the month after discharge was estimated to reduce rehospitalizations and produce significant cost savings.¹³

With other specific discharge diagnoses, results are varied. Two small observational studies in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease had conflicting results—one found a modest reduction in readmission and emergency department (ED) visits for patients seen by a PCP or pulmonologist within 30 days of discharge,¹⁴ and the other found no effect on readmissions but an associated reduction in mortality.¹⁵ More data are needed to clarify further the interaction of postdischarge visits with mortality, but the association between postdischarge physician visits and readmission reduction is controversial for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Finally, the evidence for dedicated postdischarge clinics is even more limited. A study of a hospitalist-led postdischarge clinic in a Veterans Affairs hospital found reduced length of stay and earlier postdischarge follow-up in a postdischarge clinic, but no effect on readmissions.¹⁶ Other studies have found earlier postdischarge follow-up with dedicated discharge clinics but have not evaluated readmission rates specifically.¹⁷In summary, the effect of postdischarge visits on risk for readmission is an area of active research, but remains unclear. The data reviewed suggest a benefit for the highest risk patients, specifically those with severe chronic illness, or those deemed high-risk with a readmission tool.⁹ At present, because physicians cannot accurately predict which patients will be readmitted,¹⁸ discharging physicians often take a broad approach and schedule outpatient visits for all patients. As readmission tools are further refined, the group of patients who will benefit from postdischarge care will be easier to identify, and a benefit to postdischarge visits may be seen

It is also important to note that this review emphasizes the physician visit and its potential impact on readmissions. Socioeconomic causes are increasingly being recognized as driving readmissions and other utilization.¹⁹ Whether an isolated physician visit is sufficient to prevent readmissions for patients with nonmedical drivers of healthcare utilization is unclear. For those patients, a discharge visit likely is a necessary component of a readmission reduction strategy for high-risk patients, but may be insufficient for patients who require not just an isolated visit but rather a more integrated and comprehensive care program.^8,20,21

Despite the unclear relationship between postdischarge physician care and readmissions, dedicated postdischarge clinics, some staffed by hospitalists, have been adopted over the past 10 years. The three primary types of clinics arise in safety net environments, in academic medical centers, and as comprehensive high-risk patient solutions. Reviewing several types of clinics further clarifies the nature of this structural innovation.

Safety Net Hospital Models

Safety net hospitals and their hospitalists struggle with securing adequate postdischarge access for their population, which has inadequate insurance and poor access to primary care. Patient characteristics also play a role in the complex postdischarge care for this population, given its high rate of ED use (owing to perceived convenience and capabilities) for ambulatory-sensitive conditions.²² In addition, immigrants, particularly those with low English-language proficiency, underuse and have poor access to primary care.^23,24 Postdischarge clinics in this environment focus first on providing a reliable postdischarge plan and then on linking to primary care. Examples of two clinics are at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington²⁵ and Texas Health in Fort Worth.

Harborview is a 400-bed hospital affiliated with the University of Washington. More than 50% of its patients are considered indigent. The clinic was established in 2007 to provide a postdischarge option for uninsured patients, and a link to primary care in federally qualified health centers. The clinic was staffed 5 days a week with one or two hospitalists or advanced practice nurses. Visit duration was 20 minutes, 270 visits occurred per month, and the no-show rate was 30%. A small subgroup of the hospitalist group staffed the clinic. Particular clinical foci included CHF patients, patients with wound-care needs, and homeless, immigrant, and recently incarcerated patients. A key goal was connecting to longitudinal primary care, and the clinic successfully connected more than 70% of patients to primary care in community health centers. This clinic ultimately transitioned from a hospitalist practice to a primary care practice with a primary focus on post-ED follow-up for unaffiliated patients.²⁶

In 2010, Texas Health faced a similar challenge with unaffiliated patients, and established a nurse practitioner–based clinic with hospitalist oversight to provide care primarily for patients without insurance or without an existing primary care relationship.

Academic Medical Center Models

Another clinical model is designed for patients who receive primary care at practices affiliated with academic medical centers. Although many of these patients have insurance and a PCP, there is often no availability with their continuity provider, because of the resident’s inpatient schedule or the faculty member’s conflicting priorities.^27,28 Academic medical centers, including the University of California at San Francisco, the University of New Mexico, and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, have established discharge clinics within their faculty primary care practices. A model of this type of clinic was set up at Beth Israel Deaconess in 2010. Staffed by four hospitalists and using 40-minute appointments, this clinic was physically based in the primary care practice. As such, it took advantage of the existing clinic’s administrative and clinical functions, including triage, billing, and scheduling. A visit was scheduled in that clinic by the discharging physician team if a primary care appointment was not available with the patient’s continuity provider. Visits were standardized and focused on outstanding issues at discharge, medication reconciliation, and symptom trajectory. The hospitalists used the clinic’s clinical resources, including nurses, social workers, and pharmacists, but had no other dedicated staff. That there were only four hospitalists meant they were able to gain sufficient exposure to the outpatient setting, provide consistent high-quality care, and gain credibility with the PCPs. As the patients who were seen had PCPs of their own, during the visit significant attention was focused first on the postdischarge concerns, and then on promptly returning the patients to routine primary care. Significant patient outreach was used to address the clinic’s no-show rate, which was almost 50% in the early months. Within a year, the rate was down, closer to 20%. This clinic closed in 2015 after the primary care practice, in which it was based, transitioned to a patient-centered medical home. Since that time, this type of initiative has spread further, with neurohospitalist discharge clinics established, and postdischarge neurology follow-up becoming faster and more reliable.²⁹

Academic medical centers and safety net hospitals substitute for routine primary care to address the basic challenge of primary care access, often without significant enhancements or additional resources, such as dedicated care management and pharmacy, social work, and nursing support. Commonalities of these clinics include dedicated physician staff, appointments generally longer than average outpatient appointments, and visit content concentrated on the key issues at transition (medication reconciliation, outstanding tests, symptom trajectory). As possible, clinics adopted a multidisciplinary approach, with social workers, community health workers, and nurses, to respond to the breadth of patients’ postdischarge needs, which often extend beyond pure medical need. The most frequent barriers encountered included the knowledge gap for hospitalist providers in the outpatient setting (a gap mitigated by using dedicated providers) and the patients’ high no-show rate (not surprising given that the providers are generally new to them). Few clinics have attempted to create continuity across inpatient and outpatient providers, though continuity might reduce no-shows as well as eliminate at least 1 transition.

Comprehensive High-Risk Patient Solutions

At the other end of the clinic spectrum are more integrated postdischarge approaches, which also evolved from the hospitalist model with hospitalist staffing. However, these approaches were introduced in response to the clinical needs of the highest risk patients (who are most vulnerable to frequent provider transitions), not to a systemic inability to provide routine postdischarge care.³⁰

The most long-standing model for this type of clinic is represented by CareMore Health System, a subsidiary of Anthem.^30-32 The extensivist, an expanded-scope hospitalist, acts as primary care coordinator, coordinating a multidisciplinary team for a panel of about 100 patients, representing the sickest 5% of the Medicare Advantage–insured population. Unlike the traditional hospitalist, the extensivist follows patients across all care sites, including hospital, rehabilitation sites, and outpatient clinic. For the most part, this relationship is not designed to evolve into a longitudinal relationship, but rather is an intervention only for the several-months period of acute need. Internal data have shown effects on hospital readmissions as well as length of stay.³⁰

Another integrated clinic was established in 2013, at the University of Chicago. This was an effort to redesign care for patients at highest risk for hospitalization.³³ Similar to the CareMore process, a high-risk population is identified by prior hospitalization and expected high Medicare costs. A comprehensive care physician cares for these patients across care settings. The clinic takes a team-based approach to patient care, with team members selected on the basis of patient need. Physicians have panels limited to only 200 patients, and generally spend part of the day in clinic, and part in seeing their hospitalized patients. Although reminiscent of a traditional primary care setting, this clinic is designed specifically for a high-risk, frequently hospitalized population, and therefore requires physicians with both a skill set akin to that of hospitalists, and an approach of palliative care and holistic patient care. Outcomes from this trial clinic are expected in 2017 or 2018.

Considering some key operational questions (Table) can help guide hospitals, hospitalists, and healthcare systems as they venture into the postdischarge clinic space. Return on investment and sustainability are two key questions for postdischarge clinics.

Return on investment varies by payment structure. In capitated environments with a strong emphasis on readmissions and total medical expenditure, a successful postdischarge clinic would recoup the investment through readmission reduction. However, maintaining adequate patient volume against high no-show rates may strain the group financially. In addition, although a hospitalist group may reap few measurable benefits from this clinical exposure, the unique view of the outpatient world afforded to hospitalists working in this environment could enrich the group as a whole by providing a more well-rounded vantage point.

Another key question surrounds sustainability. The clinic at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston temporarily closed due to high inpatient volume and corresponding need for those hospitalists in the inpatient setting, early in its inception. It subsequently closed due to evolution in the clinic where it was based, rendering it unnecessary. Clinics that are contingent on other clinics will be vulnerable to external forces. Finally, staffing these clinics may be a stretch for a hospitalist group, as a partly different skill set is required for patient care in the outpatient setting. Hospitalists interested in care transitions are well suited for this role. In addition, hospitalists interested in more clinical variety, or in more schedule variety than that provided in a traditional hospitalist schedule, often enjoy the work. A vast majority of hospitalists think PCPs are responsible for postdischarge problems, and would not be interested in working in the postdischarge world.³⁴ A poor fit for providers may lead to clinic failure.

As evident from this review, gaps in understanding the benefits of postdischarge care have persisted for 10 years. Discharge clinics have been scantly described in the literature. The primary unanswered question remains the effect on readmissions, but this has been the sole research focus to date. Other key research areas are the impact on other patient-centered clinical and system outcomes (eg, patient satisfaction, particularly for patients seeing new providers), postdischarge mortality, the effect on other adverse events, and total medical expenditure.

The healthcare system is evolving in the context of a focus on readmissions, primary care access challenges, and high-risk patients’ specific needs. These forces are spurring innovation in the realm of postdischarge physician clinics, as even the basic need for an appointment may not be met by the existing outpatient primary care system. In this context, multiple new outpatient care structures have arisen, many staffed by hospitalists. Some, such as clinics based in safety net hospitals and academic medical centers, address the simple requirement that patients who lack easy access, because of insurance status or provider availability, can see a doctor after discharge. This type of clinic may be an essential step in alleviating a strained system but may not represent a sustainable long-term solution. More comprehensive solutions for improving patient care and clinical outcomes may be offered by integrated systems, such as CareMore, which also emerged from the hospitalist model. A lasting question is whether these clinics, both the narrowly focused and the comprehensive, will have longevity in the evolving healthcare market. Inevitably, though, hospitalist directors will continue to raise such questions, and should stand to benefit from the experiences of others described in this review.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

Readmission prevention is paramount for hospitals and, by extension, hospitalist programs. Hospitalists see early and reliable outpatient follow-up as a safe landing for their most complicated patient cases. The option of a postdischarge clinic arises from the challenge to arrange adequate postdischarge care for patients who lack easy access because of insurance or provider availability. Guaranteeing postdischarge access by opening a dedicated, hospitalist-led postdischarge clinic appears to be an easy solution, but it is a solution that requires significant investment (including investment in physician and staff training and administrative support) and careful navigation of existing primary care relationships. In addition, a clinic staffed only with physicians may not be well equipped to address the complex social factors in healthcare utilization and readmission. Better understanding of the evidence supporting post discharge physician visits, several models of clinics, and the key operational questions are essential to address before crossing the inpatient-outpatient divide.

A postdischarge outpatient provider visit is often seen as a key factor in reducing readmissions. In 2013, Medicare added strength to this association by establishing transitional care management codes, which provide enhanced reimbursement to providers for a visit within 7 or 14 days of discharge, with focused attention on transitional issues.¹ However, whether a postdischarge visit reduces readmissions remains unclear. Given evidence that higher primary care density is associated with lower healthcare utilization,² CMS’s financial investment in incentivizing post discharge physician visits may be a good bet. On the other hand, simply having a primary care physician (PCP) may be a risk factor for readmission. This association suggests that postdischarge vigilance leads to identification of medical problems that lead to rehospitalization.³ This uncertainty is not resolved in systematic reviews of readmission reduction initiatives, which were not focused solely on the impact of a physician visit.^4,5

The earliest study of postdischarge visits in a general medical population found an association between intensive outpatient follow-up by new providers in a Veterans Affairs population and an increase in hospital readmissions.⁶ This model is similar to some hospitalist models for postdischarge clinics, as the visit was with a noncontinuity provider. The largest recent study, of patients hospitalized with acute myocardial infarction, community-acquired pneumonia, or congestive heart failure (CHF) between 2009 and 2012, found increased frequency of postdischarge follow-up but no concomitant reduction in readmissions.⁷ Although small observational studies⁸ have found a postdischarge primary care visit may reduce the risk for readmission in general medical patients, the bulk of the recent data is negative.

In high-risk patients, however, there may be a clear benefit to postdischarge follow-up. In a North Carolina Medicaid population, a physician visit after discharge was associated with fewer readmissions among high-risk patients, but not among lower risk patients, whose readmission rates were low to start.⁹ The results of that study support the idea that risk stratification may identify patients who can benefit from more intensive outpatient follow-up. In general medical populations, existing studies may suffer from an absence of adequate risk assessment.

The evidence in specific disease states may show a clearer association between a postdischarge physician visit and reduced risk for readmission. One quarter of patients with CHF are rehospitalized within 30 days of discharge.¹⁰ In this disease with frequent exacerbations, a clinic visit to monitor volume status, weight, and medication adherence might reduce the frequency of readmissions or prolong the interval between rehospitalizations. A large observational study observed that earlier post discharge follow up by a cardiologist or a PCP was associated with lower risk of readmission, but only in the quintile with the closest follow-up. In addition, fewer than 40% of patients in this group had a visit within 7 days.¹¹ In another heart failure population, follow-up with either a PCP or cardiologist within 7 days of discharge was again associated with lower risk for readmission.¹² Thus, data suggest a protective effect of postdischarge visits in CHF patients, in contrast to a general medical population. Patients with end-stage renal disease may also fit in this group protected by a postdischarge physician visit, as 1 additional visit within the month after discharge was estimated to reduce rehospitalizations and produce significant cost savings.¹³

With other specific discharge diagnoses, results are varied. Two small observational studies in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease had conflicting results—one found a modest reduction in readmission and emergency department (ED) visits for patients seen by a PCP or pulmonologist within 30 days of discharge,¹⁴ and the other found no effect on readmissions but an associated reduction in mortality.¹⁵ More data are needed to clarify further the interaction of postdischarge visits with mortality, but the association between postdischarge physician visits and readmission reduction is controversial for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Finally, the evidence for dedicated postdischarge clinics is even more limited. A study of a hospitalist-led postdischarge clinic in a Veterans Affairs hospital found reduced length of stay and earlier postdischarge follow-up in a postdischarge clinic, but no effect on readmissions.¹⁶ Other studies have found earlier postdischarge follow-up with dedicated discharge clinics but have not evaluated readmission rates specifically.¹⁷In summary, the effect of postdischarge visits on risk for readmission is an area of active research, but remains unclear. The data reviewed suggest a benefit for the highest risk patients, specifically those with severe chronic illness, or those deemed high-risk with a readmission tool.⁹ At present, because physicians cannot accurately predict which patients will be readmitted,¹⁸ discharging physicians often take a broad approach and schedule outpatient visits for all patients. As readmission tools are further refined, the group of patients who will benefit from postdischarge care will be easier to identify, and a benefit to postdischarge visits may be seen

It is also important to note that this review emphasizes the physician visit and its potential impact on readmissions. Socioeconomic causes are increasingly being recognized as driving readmissions and other utilization.¹⁹ Whether an isolated physician visit is sufficient to prevent readmissions for patients with nonmedical drivers of healthcare utilization is unclear. For those patients, a discharge visit likely is a necessary component of a readmission reduction strategy for high-risk patients, but may be insufficient for patients who require not just an isolated visit but rather a more integrated and comprehensive care program.^8,20,21

Despite the unclear relationship between postdischarge physician care and readmissions, dedicated postdischarge clinics, some staffed by hospitalists, have been adopted over the past 10 years. The three primary types of clinics arise in safety net environments, in academic medical centers, and as comprehensive high-risk patient solutions. Reviewing several types of clinics further clarifies the nature of this structural innovation.

Safety Net Hospital Models

Safety net hospitals and their hospitalists struggle with securing adequate postdischarge access for their population, which has inadequate insurance and poor access to primary care. Patient characteristics also play a role in the complex postdischarge care for this population, given its high rate of ED use (owing to perceived convenience and capabilities) for ambulatory-sensitive conditions.²² In addition, immigrants, particularly those with low English-language proficiency, underuse and have poor access to primary care.^23,24 Postdischarge clinics in this environment focus first on providing a reliable postdischarge plan and then on linking to primary care. Examples of two clinics are at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington²⁵ and Texas Health in Fort Worth.

Harborview is a 400-bed hospital affiliated with the University of Washington. More than 50% of its patients are considered indigent. The clinic was established in 2007 to provide a postdischarge option for uninsured patients, and a link to primary care in federally qualified health centers. The clinic was staffed 5 days a week with one or two hospitalists or advanced practice nurses. Visit duration was 20 minutes, 270 visits occurred per month, and the no-show rate was 30%. A small subgroup of the hospitalist group staffed the clinic. Particular clinical foci included CHF patients, patients with wound-care needs, and homeless, immigrant, and recently incarcerated patients. A key goal was connecting to longitudinal primary care, and the clinic successfully connected more than 70% of patients to primary care in community health centers. This clinic ultimately transitioned from a hospitalist practice to a primary care practice with a primary focus on post-ED follow-up for unaffiliated patients.²⁶

In 2010, Texas Health faced a similar challenge with unaffiliated patients, and established a nurse practitioner–based clinic with hospitalist oversight to provide care primarily for patients without insurance or without an existing primary care relationship.

Academic Medical Center Models

Another clinical model is designed for patients who receive primary care at practices affiliated with academic medical centers. Although many of these patients have insurance and a PCP, there is often no availability with their continuity provider, because of the resident’s inpatient schedule or the faculty member’s conflicting priorities.^27,28 Academic medical centers, including the University of California at San Francisco, the University of New Mexico, and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, have established discharge clinics within their faculty primary care practices. A model of this type of clinic was set up at Beth Israel Deaconess in 2010. Staffed by four hospitalists and using 40-minute appointments, this clinic was physically based in the primary care practice. As such, it took advantage of the existing clinic’s administrative and clinical functions, including triage, billing, and scheduling. A visit was scheduled in that clinic by the discharging physician team if a primary care appointment was not available with the patient’s continuity provider. Visits were standardized and focused on outstanding issues at discharge, medication reconciliation, and symptom trajectory. The hospitalists used the clinic’s clinical resources, including nurses, social workers, and pharmacists, but had no other dedicated staff. That there were only four hospitalists meant they were able to gain sufficient exposure to the outpatient setting, provide consistent high-quality care, and gain credibility with the PCPs. As the patients who were seen had PCPs of their own, during the visit significant attention was focused first on the postdischarge concerns, and then on promptly returning the patients to routine primary care. Significant patient outreach was used to address the clinic’s no-show rate, which was almost 50% in the early months. Within a year, the rate was down, closer to 20%. This clinic closed in 2015 after the primary care practice, in which it was based, transitioned to a patient-centered medical home. Since that time, this type of initiative has spread further, with neurohospitalist discharge clinics established, and postdischarge neurology follow-up becoming faster and more reliable.²⁹

Academic medical centers and safety net hospitals substitute for routine primary care to address the basic challenge of primary care access, often without significant enhancements or additional resources, such as dedicated care management and pharmacy, social work, and nursing support. Commonalities of these clinics include dedicated physician staff, appointments generally longer than average outpatient appointments, and visit content concentrated on the key issues at transition (medication reconciliation, outstanding tests, symptom trajectory). As possible, clinics adopted a multidisciplinary approach, with social workers, community health workers, and nurses, to respond to the breadth of patients’ postdischarge needs, which often extend beyond pure medical need. The most frequent barriers encountered included the knowledge gap for hospitalist providers in the outpatient setting (a gap mitigated by using dedicated providers) and the patients’ high no-show rate (not surprising given that the providers are generally new to them). Few clinics have attempted to create continuity across inpatient and outpatient providers, though continuity might reduce no-shows as well as eliminate at least 1 transition.

Comprehensive High-Risk Patient Solutions

At the other end of the clinic spectrum are more integrated postdischarge approaches, which also evolved from the hospitalist model with hospitalist staffing. However, these approaches were introduced in response to the clinical needs of the highest risk patients (who are most vulnerable to frequent provider transitions), not to a systemic inability to provide routine postdischarge care.³⁰

The most long-standing model for this type of clinic is represented by CareMore Health System, a subsidiary of Anthem.^30-32 The extensivist, an expanded-scope hospitalist, acts as primary care coordinator, coordinating a multidisciplinary team for a panel of about 100 patients, representing the sickest 5% of the Medicare Advantage–insured population. Unlike the traditional hospitalist, the extensivist follows patients across all care sites, including hospital, rehabilitation sites, and outpatient clinic. For the most part, this relationship is not designed to evolve into a longitudinal relationship, but rather is an intervention only for the several-months period of acute need. Internal data have shown effects on hospital readmissions as well as length of stay.³⁰

Another integrated clinic was established in 2013, at the University of Chicago. This was an effort to redesign care for patients at highest risk for hospitalization.³³ Similar to the CareMore process, a high-risk population is identified by prior hospitalization and expected high Medicare costs. A comprehensive care physician cares for these patients across care settings. The clinic takes a team-based approach to patient care, with team members selected on the basis of patient need. Physicians have panels limited to only 200 patients, and generally spend part of the day in clinic, and part in seeing their hospitalized patients. Although reminiscent of a traditional primary care setting, this clinic is designed specifically for a high-risk, frequently hospitalized population, and therefore requires physicians with both a skill set akin to that of hospitalists, and an approach of palliative care and holistic patient care. Outcomes from this trial clinic are expected in 2017 or 2018.

Considering some key operational questions (Table) can help guide hospitals, hospitalists, and healthcare systems as they venture into the postdischarge clinic space. Return on investment and sustainability are two key questions for postdischarge clinics.

Return on investment varies by payment structure. In capitated environments with a strong emphasis on readmissions and total medical expenditure, a successful postdischarge clinic would recoup the investment through readmission reduction. However, maintaining adequate patient volume against high no-show rates may strain the group financially. In addition, although a hospitalist group may reap few measurable benefits from this clinical exposure, the unique view of the outpatient world afforded to hospitalists working in this environment could enrich the group as a whole by providing a more well-rounded vantage point.

Another key question surrounds sustainability. The clinic at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston temporarily closed due to high inpatient volume and corresponding need for those hospitalists in the inpatient setting, early in its inception. It subsequently closed due to evolution in the clinic where it was based, rendering it unnecessary. Clinics that are contingent on other clinics will be vulnerable to external forces. Finally, staffing these clinics may be a stretch for a hospitalist group, as a partly different skill set is required for patient care in the outpatient setting. Hospitalists interested in care transitions are well suited for this role. In addition, hospitalists interested in more clinical variety, or in more schedule variety than that provided in a traditional hospitalist schedule, often enjoy the work. A vast majority of hospitalists think PCPs are responsible for postdischarge problems, and would not be interested in working in the postdischarge world.³⁴ A poor fit for providers may lead to clinic failure.

As evident from this review, gaps in understanding the benefits of postdischarge care have persisted for 10 years. Discharge clinics have been scantly described in the literature. The primary unanswered question remains the effect on readmissions, but this has been the sole research focus to date. Other key research areas are the impact on other patient-centered clinical and system outcomes (eg, patient satisfaction, particularly for patients seeing new providers), postdischarge mortality, the effect on other adverse events, and total medical expenditure.

The healthcare system is evolving in the context of a focus on readmissions, primary care access challenges, and high-risk patients’ specific needs. These forces are spurring innovation in the realm of postdischarge physician clinics, as even the basic need for an appointment may not be met by the existing outpatient primary care system. In this context, multiple new outpatient care structures have arisen, many staffed by hospitalists. Some, such as clinics based in safety net hospitals and academic medical centers, address the simple requirement that patients who lack easy access, because of insurance status or provider availability, can see a doctor after discharge. This type of clinic may be an essential step in alleviating a strained system but may not represent a sustainable long-term solution. More comprehensive solutions for improving patient care and clinical outcomes may be offered by integrated systems, such as CareMore, which also emerged from the hospitalist model. A lasting question is whether these clinics, both the narrowly focused and the comprehensive, will have longevity in the evolving healthcare market. Inevitably, though, hospitalist directors will continue to raise such questions, and should stand to benefit from the experiences of others described in this review.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

Readmission prevention is paramount for hospitals and, by extension, hospitalist programs. Hospitalists see early and reliable outpatient follow-up as a safe landing for their most complicated patient cases. The option of a postdischarge clinic arises from the challenge to arrange adequate postdischarge care for patients who lack easy access because of insurance or provider availability. Guaranteeing postdischarge access by opening a dedicated, hospitalist-led postdischarge clinic appears to be an easy solution, but it is a solution that requires significant investment (including investment in physician and staff training and administrative support) and careful navigation of existing primary care relationships. In addition, a clinic staffed only with physicians may not be well equipped to address the complex social factors in healthcare utilization and readmission. Better understanding of the evidence supporting post discharge physician visits, several models of clinics, and the key operational questions are essential to address before crossing the inpatient-outpatient divide.

A postdischarge outpatient provider visit is often seen as a key factor in reducing readmissions. In 2013, Medicare added strength to this association by establishing transitional care management codes, which provide enhanced reimbursement to providers for a visit within 7 or 14 days of discharge, with focused attention on transitional issues.¹ However, whether a postdischarge visit reduces readmissions remains unclear. Given evidence that higher primary care density is associated with lower healthcare utilization,² CMS’s financial investment in incentivizing post discharge physician visits may be a good bet. On the other hand, simply having a primary care physician (PCP) may be a risk factor for readmission. This association suggests that postdischarge vigilance leads to identification of medical problems that lead to rehospitalization.³ This uncertainty is not resolved in systematic reviews of readmission reduction initiatives, which were not focused solely on the impact of a physician visit.^4,5

The earliest study of postdischarge visits in a general medical population found an association between intensive outpatient follow-up by new providers in a Veterans Affairs population and an increase in hospital readmissions.⁶ This model is similar to some hospitalist models for postdischarge clinics, as the visit was with a noncontinuity provider. The largest recent study, of patients hospitalized with acute myocardial infarction, community-acquired pneumonia, or congestive heart failure (CHF) between 2009 and 2012, found increased frequency of postdischarge follow-up but no concomitant reduction in readmissions.⁷ Although small observational studies⁸ have found a postdischarge primary care visit may reduce the risk for readmission in general medical patients, the bulk of the recent data is negative.

In high-risk patients, however, there may be a clear benefit to postdischarge follow-up. In a North Carolina Medicaid population, a physician visit after discharge was associated with fewer readmissions among high-risk patients, but not among lower risk patients, whose readmission rates were low to start.⁹ The results of that study support the idea that risk stratification may identify patients who can benefit from more intensive outpatient follow-up. In general medical populations, existing studies may suffer from an absence of adequate risk assessment.

The evidence in specific disease states may show a clearer association between a postdischarge physician visit and reduced risk for readmission. One quarter of patients with CHF are rehospitalized within 30 days of discharge.¹⁰ In this disease with frequent exacerbations, a clinic visit to monitor volume status, weight, and medication adherence might reduce the frequency of readmissions or prolong the interval between rehospitalizations. A large observational study observed that earlier post discharge follow up by a cardiologist or a PCP was associated with lower risk of readmission, but only in the quintile with the closest follow-up. In addition, fewer than 40% of patients in this group had a visit within 7 days.¹¹ In another heart failure population, follow-up with either a PCP or cardiologist within 7 days of discharge was again associated with lower risk for readmission.¹² Thus, data suggest a protective effect of postdischarge visits in CHF patients, in contrast to a general medical population. Patients with end-stage renal disease may also fit in this group protected by a postdischarge physician visit, as 1 additional visit within the month after discharge was estimated to reduce rehospitalizations and produce significant cost savings.¹³

With other specific discharge diagnoses, results are varied. Two small observational studies in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease had conflicting results—one found a modest reduction in readmission and emergency department (ED) visits for patients seen by a PCP or pulmonologist within 30 days of discharge,¹⁴ and the other found no effect on readmissions but an associated reduction in mortality.¹⁵ More data are needed to clarify further the interaction of postdischarge visits with mortality, but the association between postdischarge physician visits and readmission reduction is controversial for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Finally, the evidence for dedicated postdischarge clinics is even more limited. A study of a hospitalist-led postdischarge clinic in a Veterans Affairs hospital found reduced length of stay and earlier postdischarge follow-up in a postdischarge clinic, but no effect on readmissions.¹⁶ Other studies have found earlier postdischarge follow-up with dedicated discharge clinics but have not evaluated readmission rates specifically.¹⁷In summary, the effect of postdischarge visits on risk for readmission is an area of active research, but remains unclear. The data reviewed suggest a benefit for the highest risk patients, specifically those with severe chronic illness, or those deemed high-risk with a readmission tool.⁹ At present, because physicians cannot accurately predict which patients will be readmitted,¹⁸ discharging physicians often take a broad approach and schedule outpatient visits for all patients. As readmission tools are further refined, the group of patients who will benefit from postdischarge care will be easier to identify, and a benefit to postdischarge visits may be seen

It is also important to note that this review emphasizes the physician visit and its potential impact on readmissions. Socioeconomic causes are increasingly being recognized as driving readmissions and other utilization.¹⁹ Whether an isolated physician visit is sufficient to prevent readmissions for patients with nonmedical drivers of healthcare utilization is unclear. For those patients, a discharge visit likely is a necessary component of a readmission reduction strategy for high-risk patients, but may be insufficient for patients who require not just an isolated visit but rather a more integrated and comprehensive care program.^8,20,21

Despite the unclear relationship between postdischarge physician care and readmissions, dedicated postdischarge clinics, some staffed by hospitalists, have been adopted over the past 10 years. The three primary types of clinics arise in safety net environments, in academic medical centers, and as comprehensive high-risk patient solutions. Reviewing several types of clinics further clarifies the nature of this structural innovation.

Safety Net Hospital Models

Safety net hospitals and their hospitalists struggle with securing adequate postdischarge access for their population, which has inadequate insurance and poor access to primary care. Patient characteristics also play a role in the complex postdischarge care for this population, given its high rate of ED use (owing to perceived convenience and capabilities) for ambulatory-sensitive conditions.²² In addition, immigrants, particularly those with low English-language proficiency, underuse and have poor access to primary care.^23,24 Postdischarge clinics in this environment focus first on providing a reliable postdischarge plan and then on linking to primary care. Examples of two clinics are at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington²⁵ and Texas Health in Fort Worth.

Harborview is a 400-bed hospital affiliated with the University of Washington. More than 50% of its patients are considered indigent. The clinic was established in 2007 to provide a postdischarge option for uninsured patients, and a link to primary care in federally qualified health centers. The clinic was staffed 5 days a week with one or two hospitalists or advanced practice nurses. Visit duration was 20 minutes, 270 visits occurred per month, and the no-show rate was 30%. A small subgroup of the hospitalist group staffed the clinic. Particular clinical foci included CHF patients, patients with wound-care needs, and homeless, immigrant, and recently incarcerated patients. A key goal was connecting to longitudinal primary care, and the clinic successfully connected more than 70% of patients to primary care in community health centers. This clinic ultimately transitioned from a hospitalist practice to a primary care practice with a primary focus on post-ED follow-up for unaffiliated patients.²⁶

In 2010, Texas Health faced a similar challenge with unaffiliated patients, and established a nurse practitioner–based clinic with hospitalist oversight to provide care primarily for patients without insurance or without an existing primary care relationship.

Academic Medical Center Models

Another clinical model is designed for patients who receive primary care at practices affiliated with academic medical centers. Although many of these patients have insurance and a PCP, there is often no availability with their continuity provider, because of the resident’s inpatient schedule or the faculty member’s conflicting priorities.^27,28 Academic medical centers, including the University of California at San Francisco, the University of New Mexico, and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, have established discharge clinics within their faculty primary care practices. A model of this type of clinic was set up at Beth Israel Deaconess in 2010. Staffed by four hospitalists and using 40-minute appointments, this clinic was physically based in the primary care practice. As such, it took advantage of the existing clinic’s administrative and clinical functions, including triage, billing, and scheduling. A visit was scheduled in that clinic by the discharging physician team if a primary care appointment was not available with the patient’s continuity provider. Visits were standardized and focused on outstanding issues at discharge, medication reconciliation, and symptom trajectory. The hospitalists used the clinic’s clinical resources, including nurses, social workers, and pharmacists, but had no other dedicated staff. That there were only four hospitalists meant they were able to gain sufficient exposure to the outpatient setting, provide consistent high-quality care, and gain credibility with the PCPs. As the patients who were seen had PCPs of their own, during the visit significant attention was focused first on the postdischarge concerns, and then on promptly returning the patients to routine primary care. Significant patient outreach was used to address the clinic’s no-show rate, which was almost 50% in the early months. Within a year, the rate was down, closer to 20%. This clinic closed in 2015 after the primary care practice, in which it was based, transitioned to a patient-centered medical home. Since that time, this type of initiative has spread further, with neurohospitalist discharge clinics established, and postdischarge neurology follow-up becoming faster and more reliable.²⁹

Academic medical centers and safety net hospitals substitute for routine primary care to address the basic challenge of primary care access, often without significant enhancements or additional resources, such as dedicated care management and pharmacy, social work, and nursing support. Commonalities of these clinics include dedicated physician staff, appointments generally longer than average outpatient appointments, and visit content concentrated on the key issues at transition (medication reconciliation, outstanding tests, symptom trajectory). As possible, clinics adopted a multidisciplinary approach, with social workers, community health workers, and nurses, to respond to the breadth of patients’ postdischarge needs, which often extend beyond pure medical need. The most frequent barriers encountered included the knowledge gap for hospitalist providers in the outpatient setting (a gap mitigated by using dedicated providers) and the patients’ high no-show rate (not surprising given that the providers are generally new to them). Few clinics have attempted to create continuity across inpatient and outpatient providers, though continuity might reduce no-shows as well as eliminate at least 1 transition.

Comprehensive High-Risk Patient Solutions

At the other end of the clinic spectrum are more integrated postdischarge approaches, which also evolved from the hospitalist model with hospitalist staffing. However, these approaches were introduced in response to the clinical needs of the highest risk patients (who are most vulnerable to frequent provider transitions), not to a systemic inability to provide routine postdischarge care.³⁰

The most long-standing model for this type of clinic is represented by CareMore Health System, a subsidiary of Anthem.^30-32 The extensivist, an expanded-scope hospitalist, acts as primary care coordinator, coordinating a multidisciplinary team for a panel of about 100 patients, representing the sickest 5% of the Medicare Advantage–insured population. Unlike the traditional hospitalist, the extensivist follows patients across all care sites, including hospital, rehabilitation sites, and outpatient clinic. For the most part, this relationship is not designed to evolve into a longitudinal relationship, but rather is an intervention only for the several-months period of acute need. Internal data have shown effects on hospital readmissions as well as length of stay.³⁰

Another integrated clinic was established in 2013, at the University of Chicago. This was an effort to redesign care for patients at highest risk for hospitalization.³³ Similar to the CareMore process, a high-risk population is identified by prior hospitalization and expected high Medicare costs. A comprehensive care physician cares for these patients across care settings. The clinic takes a team-based approach to patient care, with team members selected on the basis of patient need. Physicians have panels limited to only 200 patients, and generally spend part of the day in clinic, and part in seeing their hospitalized patients. Although reminiscent of a traditional primary care setting, this clinic is designed specifically for a high-risk, frequently hospitalized population, and therefore requires physicians with both a skill set akin to that of hospitalists, and an approach of palliative care and holistic patient care. Outcomes from this trial clinic are expected in 2017 or 2018.

Considering some key operational questions (Table) can help guide hospitals, hospitalists, and healthcare systems as they venture into the postdischarge clinic space. Return on investment and sustainability are two key questions for postdischarge clinics.

Return on investment varies by payment structure. In capitated environments with a strong emphasis on readmissions and total medical expenditure, a successful postdischarge clinic would recoup the investment through readmission reduction. However, maintaining adequate patient volume against high no-show rates may strain the group financially. In addition, although a hospitalist group may reap few measurable benefits from this clinical exposure, the unique view of the outpatient world afforded to hospitalists working in this environment could enrich the group as a whole by providing a more well-rounded vantage point.

Another key question surrounds sustainability. The clinic at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston temporarily closed due to high inpatient volume and corresponding need for those hospitalists in the inpatient setting, early in its inception. It subsequently closed due to evolution in the clinic where it was based, rendering it unnecessary. Clinics that are contingent on other clinics will be vulnerable to external forces. Finally, staffing these clinics may be a stretch for a hospitalist group, as a partly different skill set is required for patient care in the outpatient setting. Hospitalists interested in care transitions are well suited for this role. In addition, hospitalists interested in more clinical variety, or in more schedule variety than that provided in a traditional hospitalist schedule, often enjoy the work. A vast majority of hospitalists think PCPs are responsible for postdischarge problems, and would not be interested in working in the postdischarge world.³⁴ A poor fit for providers may lead to clinic failure.

As evident from this review, gaps in understanding the benefits of postdischarge care have persisted for 10 years. Discharge clinics have been scantly described in the literature. The primary unanswered question remains the effect on readmissions, but this has been the sole research focus to date. Other key research areas are the impact on other patient-centered clinical and system outcomes (eg, patient satisfaction, particularly for patients seeing new providers), postdischarge mortality, the effect on other adverse events, and total medical expenditure.

The healthcare system is evolving in the context of a focus on readmissions, primary care access challenges, and high-risk patients’ specific needs. These forces are spurring innovation in the realm of postdischarge physician clinics, as even the basic need for an appointment may not be met by the existing outpatient primary care system. In this context, multiple new outpatient care structures have arisen, many staffed by hospitalists. Some, such as clinics based in safety net hospitals and academic medical centers, address the simple requirement that patients who lack easy access, because of insurance status or provider availability, can see a doctor after discharge. This type of clinic may be an essential step in alleviating a strained system but may not represent a sustainable long-term solution. More comprehensive solutions for improving patient care and clinical outcomes may be offered by integrated systems, such as CareMore, which also emerged from the hospitalist model. A lasting question is whether these clinics, both the narrowly focused and the comprehensive, will have longevity in the evolving healthcare market. Inevitably, though, hospitalist directors will continue to raise such questions, and should stand to benefit from the experiences of others described in this review.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

Measles is a highly contagious acute respiratory illness that includes a characteristic rash. After exposure, up to 90% of susceptible persons develop measles.¹ Even though it is considered a childhood illness, measles can affect people of all age groups. Measles continues to be major health problem around the world, despite the availability of a safe and effective vaccine, and it remains one of the leading causes of childhood mortality, with nearly 115,000 deaths reported by the World Health Organization² in 2014. In 2000, measles was declared eliminated from the United States, but outbreaks still occasionally occur.^3-6

The disease is self-limited, but some patients develop complications that may require hospitalization for treatment. People at highest risk for complications are children younger than 5 years, adults older than 20 years, pregnant women, and immunocompromised individuals.⁷

During the licensure of live measles vaccine in 1963, an average of 549,000 measles cases and 495 measles deaths, as well as 48,000 hospitalizations and 4000 encephalitis cases, were reported annually in the United States. Almost all Americans were affected by measles by adolescence.

Implementation of the 1-dose vaccine program substantially reduced reported incidence in the United States by 1988, and led to a dramatic decline in measles-related hospitalizations and deaths.^3-6 The 2-dose MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccination was introduced in 1989, and measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000.^3-6

National–level one-dose MMR coverage among children 19-35 months has remained above 90% during the last two decades.⁸ NIS-Teen vaccination coverage data for 13- to 17-year-olds since 2008 has been near or above 90%,⁹ and 94% of children enrolled in kindergarten had evidence of 2 MMR doses in the 2014-2015 school year.¹⁰

A large multistate measles outbreak was reported in the United States in 2014-2015.^4,11 One hundred fifty-nine cases were reported in the United States between January 4 and April 5, 2015. The majority of patients either were unvaccinated (45%) or had an unknown vaccination status (38%). Age ranged from 6 weeks to 70 years, and 22 patients (14%) were hospitalized.⁴

Measles is caused by an RNA-containing paramyxovirus that is spread by the respiratory route. Average incubation period from exposure to rash onset is 14 days (range, 7-21 days).^12,13 Peak infectivity occurs during the prodromal phase, before rash onset (Figure 1), but patients are infectious from 4 days before rash onset through 4 days after rash onset.^7,12,13

The disease prodrome consists of a high fever (39°C-40.5°C), coryza, cough, and conjunctivitis followed by Koplik spots (Figure 2A). Koplik spots are pathognomonic for measles but rarely discovered. They appear before the skin rash alongside second molars on the buccal surface of the cheeks. The spots usually disappear when the characteristic maculopapular, nonpruritic rash erupts initially at the hairline and behind the ears, and within four days progresses toward the trunk and limbs, including the palms and soles (Figures 2B, 2C).

The presenting symptoms of primary measles infection are nonspecific, particularly if Koplik spots are not identified. The differential diagnosis for a patient who presents with high fever and rash include Kawasaki disease, dengue, parvovirus B19, serum sickness, syphilis, systemic lupus erythematous, toxic shock syndrome, enterovirus infection, human herpes virus 6 (roseola), viral hemorrhagic fever, drug eruption, infectious mononucleosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, rubella, scarlet fever, chikungunya, and Zika virus infection.

Measles complications can affect nearly every organ system (Table). Rates of complications from measles infection depend on age and underlying condition. Coexisting vitamin A deficiency increases complication rates.²⁰

Bacterial infections in the setting of measles infection are more common in adults than in children, and are more severe among people who are malnourished or have an immunodeficiency disorder. The most common infectious complications, which involve the respiratory tract, include pneumonia, laryngotracheitis (“measles croup”), bronchitis, otitis media (most common complication among children in the United States), and sinusitis.^7,13,21

Indications for hospitalizing children include respiratory distress, laryngeal obstruction, dehydration that requires intravenous fluids, diarrhea with more than 10 stools a day or bloody stool, severe anemia, altered mental status, convulsion, severe rash with developing hemorrhagic areas, extensive mouth ulcers, corneal clouding or ulcers, visual disturbance, and mastoiditis.²²

Pneumonia is a common indication for hospitalizing adults.^23,24 Measles-associated interstitial giant cell (Hecht) pneumonia is most often recognized among immunocompromised and malnourished patients.¹³ Primary pneumonia is caused by the measles virus, but bacterial superinfection can occur. The most common bacterial pathogens include Streptococcus, Pneumococcus, and Staphylococcus,^13,24 and less commonly isolated organisms include gram-negative bacteria, such as Haemophilus influenzae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Neisseria meningitides, and Enterobacter cloacae.²³

Uncommon complications of measles are myocarditis, glomerulonephritis, acute renal failure, and thrombocytopenic purpura.^25,26

Neurologic complications in measles are an important concern. Measles-associated central nervous system complications are considered a result of an immune-mediated reaction to myelin protein and not from direct viral insult.^26-28 Immunocompromised patients are at risk for developing fatal encephalitis, and those who survive often experience cognitive decline or seizures.

Measles is associated with four different encephalitic diseases: primary measles encephalitis, acute post-measles encephalomyelitis, measles inclusion body encephalitis, and subacute sclerosing panencephalitis.

Primary measles encephalitis is characterized by fever, headache, stiff neck, and meningeal signs. Onset occurs between 1 and 15 days after rash onset, and the disease affects 1/1000 patients. Seizure, altered mental status, and coma can also develop. Viral RNA detection in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) confirms the diagnosis.²⁹Acute post-measles encephalomyelitis is more common in adults than in children.¹² It typically develops after the rash fades and the other symptoms subside. Patients suddenly experience a recurrence of fevers or seizures. Deafness, intellectual decline, epilepsy, postencephalitic hyperkinesia, hemiplegia, and/or paraplegia also can develop.^27-29

Measles inclusion body encephalitis is described only in immunocompromised patients, and onset occurs within 1 year of infection. Seizures are an initial and common symptom, and some patients also experience hemiplegia, stupor, hypertonia, and dysarthria.²⁹ Diagnostic findings include seroconversion during the disease course, improvement after withholding of the immunosuppressive regimen, and normal CSF. Brain biopsy confirms the diagnosis.

Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a slowly progressing and untreatable degenerative neurologic disorder characterized by demyelination of multiple brain areas. SSPE develops 7 to 10 years after natural measles infection, and usually affects children or adolescents. Clinical presentation includes intellectual decline, frequent rhythmic myoclonic jerks, seizure, and dementia. As the disease progresses, coma, quadriplegia, vegetative state, and autonomic instability develop. Death usually occurs within 2 years of onset.^30,31 In children, the risk for SSPE after measles infection is estimated to be 4 to 11 per 100,000 infections. After the 1989-1991 resurgence of measles in the United States, however, the risk for SSPE was estimated to be 22 per 100,000 infections.^30-32 The pathogenesis of SSPE is not fully understood but is thought to result from persistent aberrant measles virus infection.³²

The SSPE diagnosis is based on clinical presentation, presence of anti-measles antibodies in CSF, typical electroencephalography pattern (periodic paroxysmal bursts) with accompanying myoclonus, tissue analysis, and magnetic resonance imaging.³⁰

Suspicion for measles should prompt immediate consultation with local or state public health officials. Laboratory testing can be carefully considered after consultation, and care is needed in interpreting serologic studies.

The mainstays of measles infection diagnosis are detection of viral RNA by reverse transcriptase–polymerase chain reaction, or isolation of the virus in the clinical specimen, and detection of measles-specific IgM (immunoglobulin M) antibodies. A detailed protocol for collecting specimens for viral isolation appears on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website (http://www.cdc.gov/measles/lab-tools/rt-pcr.html).

IgM antibodies are detectable over the 15 weeks after rash onset, but the recommendation is to collect serum between 72 hours and 4 weeks after rash onset.³³ Clinicians should be aware that false-positive IgM results may occur with rheumatologic diseases, parvovirus B19 infection, rubella, and infectious mononucleosis.

IgG (immunoglobulin G) antibodies are usually detectable a week after rash onset. The laboratory can confirm measles by detecting more than a 4-fold increase in IgG titers between the acute phase and the convalescent phase. After measles infection, most adults develop lifelong immunity with positive IgG serology.³⁴

Additional tests, such as IgG avidity and plaque reduction neutralization assay, can be used to confirm suspected cases in previously vaccinated individuals.³⁴

General Principles

Uncomplicated measles treatment is supportive and includes oral fluids and antipyretics.^7,22 Severe bacterial infections, encephalitis, or dehydration may require hospitalization, and in these cases infectious disease consultation is recommended. Patients with pneumonia, purulent otitis media, or tonsillitis should be treated with antibiotics.³⁵ Observational data suggest antibiotics may reduce the occurrence of bacterial infection in children, but there are no usage guidelines.³⁵ Vitamin A supplementation has been associated with a 50% decrease in morbidity and mortality and with blindness prevention.²² This supplementation should be considered in severe measles cases (all hospitalized patients), especially for children, regardless of country of residence, and for adult patients who exhibit clinical signs of vitamin A deficiency.^22,24

Antiviral Treatment

No specific treatment is available.³⁶ Ribavirin demonstrates in vitro activity against the virus, but the Food and Drug Administration has not approved the drug for treatment of measles. Ribavirin has been used for cases of severe measles, and for patients with SSPE along with intrathecal interferon alpha. This antiviral treatment is considered experimental.³⁷

All patients hospitalized with measles infection should be cautioned about the potential downstream complications of the disease and should follow up with their primary care physician for surveillance after discharge.³⁸

If measles symptoms develop, patients should self-quarantine and contact their primary care physician or public health department as soon as possible. Regardless of immune status, family members and other exposed persons should be educated about the measles symptoms that may occur during the 21 days after exposure.³⁸

Both suspected and confirmed cases of measles should be reported immediately to local public health authorities.

Infection Control and Prophylaxis

Current guidelines recommend 2 doses of measles-containing vaccine to all adults at higher risk for contracting measles: international travelers, healthcare personnel, and high school and college students. Infants 6 or 11 months old should receive 1 MMR dose before international travel.^1,38

Strict airborne isolation—use of N95 respirator or respirator with similar effectiveness in preventing airborne transmission—is mandatory from 3 to 5 days before rash onset to 4 days after rash onset (immunocompetent patients) or for the duration of the disease (immunocompromised patients).³⁸

Healthcare workers should have documented presumptive evidence of immunity to measles.³⁹ Healthcare providers without evidence of immunity should be excused from work from day 5 to day 21 of exposure, even if they have received postexposure vaccine or intramuscular immunoglobulin. They should be offered the first MMR dose within 72 hours of measles exposure to prevent or modify the disease. Susceptible family members or visitors should not be allowed in the patient’s room.¹

Postexposure Prophylaxis

Standard MMR vaccination within 72 hours after exposure may protect against disease in people without a contraindication to measles vaccine. The public health department usually identifies these individuals and provides postexposure prophylaxis recommendations.^38,39

People with HIV, patients receiving immunosuppressive therapy, and pregnant women and infants who have been exposed to measles and who are at risk for developing morbid disease can be treated with immunoglobulin (IG). If administered within 6 days of exposure, IG can prevent or modify disease in people who are unvaccinated or severely immunocompromised (ie, not immune). The recommended dose of IG administered intramuscularly is 0.5 mL/kg of body weight (maximum, 15 mL), and the recommended dose of IG given intravenously is 400 mg/kg. Anyone heavier than 30 kg would require intravenous IG to achieve adequate antibody levels.

Physicians should not vaccinate pregnant women, patients with severe immunosuppression from disease or therapy, patients with moderate or severe illness, and people with a history of severe allergic reaction to the vaccine.^1,40 The measles vaccine should be deferred for 6 months after IG administration.³⁶ More details are available in the recommendations made by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.¹

Although rare in the United States, measles remains a common and potentially devastating infection among patients who have not been vaccinated. Diagnosis requires clinical suspicion, engagement of public health authorities, and judicious use of laboratory testing. Hospitalists may encounter infectious and neurologic complications of measles long after the initial infection and should be aware of these associations.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

Measles is a highly contagious acute respiratory illness that includes a characteristic rash. After exposure, up to 90% of susceptible persons develop measles.¹ Even though it is considered a childhood illness, measles can affect people of all age groups. Measles continues to be major health problem around the world, despite the availability of a safe and effective vaccine, and it remains one of the leading causes of childhood mortality, with nearly 115,000 deaths reported by the World Health Organization² in 2014. In 2000, measles was declared eliminated from the United States, but outbreaks still occasionally occur.^3-6

The disease is self-limited, but some patients develop complications that may require hospitalization for treatment. People at highest risk for complications are children younger than 5 years, adults older than 20 years, pregnant women, and immunocompromised individuals.⁷

During the licensure of live measles vaccine in 1963, an average of 549,000 measles cases and 495 measles deaths, as well as 48,000 hospitalizations and 4000 encephalitis cases, were reported annually in the United States. Almost all Americans were affected by measles by adolescence.

Implementation of the 1-dose vaccine program substantially reduced reported incidence in the United States by 1988, and led to a dramatic decline in measles-related hospitalizations and deaths.^3-6 The 2-dose MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccination was introduced in 1989, and measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000.^3-6

National–level one-dose MMR coverage among children 19-35 months has remained above 90% during the last two decades.⁸ NIS-Teen vaccination coverage data for 13- to 17-year-olds since 2008 has been near or above 90%,⁹ and 94% of children enrolled in kindergarten had evidence of 2 MMR doses in the 2014-2015 school year.¹⁰

A large multistate measles outbreak was reported in the United States in 2014-2015.^4,11 One hundred fifty-nine cases were reported in the United States between January 4 and April 5, 2015. The majority of patients either were unvaccinated (45%) or had an unknown vaccination status (38%). Age ranged from 6 weeks to 70 years, and 22 patients (14%) were hospitalized.⁴

Measles is caused by an RNA-containing paramyxovirus that is spread by the respiratory route. Average incubation period from exposure to rash onset is 14 days (range, 7-21 days).^12,13 Peak infectivity occurs during the prodromal phase, before rash onset (Figure 1), but patients are infectious from 4 days before rash onset through 4 days after rash onset.^7,12,13

The disease prodrome consists of a high fever (39°C-40.5°C), coryza, cough, and conjunctivitis followed by Koplik spots (Figure 2A). Koplik spots are pathognomonic for measles but rarely discovered. They appear before the skin rash alongside second molars on the buccal surface of the cheeks. The spots usually disappear when the characteristic maculopapular, nonpruritic rash erupts initially at the hairline and behind the ears, and within four days progresses toward the trunk and limbs, including the palms and soles (Figures 2B, 2C).

The presenting symptoms of primary measles infection are nonspecific, particularly if Koplik spots are not identified. The differential diagnosis for a patient who presents with high fever and rash include Kawasaki disease, dengue, parvovirus B19, serum sickness, syphilis, systemic lupus erythematous, toxic shock syndrome, enterovirus infection, human herpes virus 6 (roseola), viral hemorrhagic fever, drug eruption, infectious mononucleosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, rubella, scarlet fever, chikungunya, and Zika virus infection.

Measles complications can affect nearly every organ system (Table). Rates of complications from measles infection depend on age and underlying condition. Coexisting vitamin A deficiency increases complication rates.²⁰

Bacterial infections in the setting of measles infection are more common in adults than in children, and are more severe among people who are malnourished or have an immunodeficiency disorder. The most common infectious complications, which involve the respiratory tract, include pneumonia, laryngotracheitis (“measles croup”), bronchitis, otitis media (most common complication among children in the United States), and sinusitis.^7,13,21

Indications for hospitalizing children include respiratory distress, laryngeal obstruction, dehydration that requires intravenous fluids, diarrhea with more than 10 stools a day or bloody stool, severe anemia, altered mental status, convulsion, severe rash with developing hemorrhagic areas, extensive mouth ulcers, corneal clouding or ulcers, visual disturbance, and mastoiditis.²²

Pneumonia is a common indication for hospitalizing adults.^23,24 Measles-associated interstitial giant cell (Hecht) pneumonia is most often recognized among immunocompromised and malnourished patients.¹³ Primary pneumonia is caused by the measles virus, but bacterial superinfection can occur. The most common bacterial pathogens include Streptococcus, Pneumococcus, and Staphylococcus,^13,24 and less commonly isolated organisms include gram-negative bacteria, such as Haemophilus influenzae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Neisseria meningitides, and Enterobacter cloacae.²³

Uncommon complications of measles are myocarditis, glomerulonephritis, acute renal failure, and thrombocytopenic purpura.^25,26

Neurologic complications in measles are an important concern. Measles-associated central nervous system complications are considered a result of an immune-mediated reaction to myelin protein and not from direct viral insult.^26-28 Immunocompromised patients are at risk for developing fatal encephalitis, and those who survive often experience cognitive decline or seizures.

Measles is associated with four different encephalitic diseases: primary measles encephalitis, acute post-measles encephalomyelitis, measles inclusion body encephalitis, and subacute sclerosing panencephalitis.

Primary measles encephalitis is characterized by fever, headache, stiff neck, and meningeal signs. Onset occurs between 1 and 15 days after rash onset, and the disease affects 1/1000 patients. Seizure, altered mental status, and coma can also develop. Viral RNA detection in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) confirms the diagnosis.²⁹Acute post-measles encephalomyelitis is more common in adults than in children.¹² It typically develops after the rash fades and the other symptoms subside. Patients suddenly experience a recurrence of fevers or seizures. Deafness, intellectual decline, epilepsy, postencephalitic hyperkinesia, hemiplegia, and/or paraplegia also can develop.^27-29

Measles inclusion body encephalitis is described only in immunocompromised patients, and onset occurs within 1 year of infection. Seizures are an initial and common symptom, and some patients also experience hemiplegia, stupor, hypertonia, and dysarthria.²⁹ Diagnostic findings include seroconversion during the disease course, improvement after withholding of the immunosuppressive regimen, and normal CSF. Brain biopsy confirms the diagnosis.

Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a slowly progressing and untreatable degenerative neurologic disorder characterized by demyelination of multiple brain areas. SSPE develops 7 to 10 years after natural measles infection, and usually affects children or adolescents. Clinical presentation includes intellectual decline, frequent rhythmic myoclonic jerks, seizure, and dementia. As the disease progresses, coma, quadriplegia, vegetative state, and autonomic instability develop. Death usually occurs within 2 years of onset.^30,31 In children, the risk for SSPE after measles infection is estimated to be 4 to 11 per 100,000 infections. After the 1989-1991 resurgence of measles in the United States, however, the risk for SSPE was estimated to be 22 per 100,000 infections.^30-32 The pathogenesis of SSPE is not fully understood but is thought to result from persistent aberrant measles virus infection.³²

The SSPE diagnosis is based on clinical presentation, presence of anti-measles antibodies in CSF, typical electroencephalography pattern (periodic paroxysmal bursts) with accompanying myoclonus, tissue analysis, and magnetic resonance imaging.³⁰

Suspicion for measles should prompt immediate consultation with local or state public health officials. Laboratory testing can be carefully considered after consultation, and care is needed in interpreting serologic studies.

The mainstays of measles infection diagnosis are detection of viral RNA by reverse transcriptase–polymerase chain reaction, or isolation of the virus in the clinical specimen, and detection of measles-specific IgM (immunoglobulin M) antibodies. A detailed protocol for collecting specimens for viral isolation appears on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website (http://www.cdc.gov/measles/lab-tools/rt-pcr.html).

IgM antibodies are detectable over the 15 weeks after rash onset, but the recommendation is to collect serum between 72 hours and 4 weeks after rash onset.³³ Clinicians should be aware that false-positive IgM results may occur with rheumatologic diseases, parvovirus B19 infection, rubella, and infectious mononucleosis.

IgG (immunoglobulin G) antibodies are usually detectable a week after rash onset. The laboratory can confirm measles by detecting more than a 4-fold increase in IgG titers between the acute phase and the convalescent phase. After measles infection, most adults develop lifelong immunity with positive IgG serology.³⁴

Additional tests, such as IgG avidity and plaque reduction neutralization assay, can be used to confirm suspected cases in previously vaccinated individuals.³⁴

General Principles

Uncomplicated measles treatment is supportive and includes oral fluids and antipyretics.^7,22 Severe bacterial infections, encephalitis, or dehydration may require hospitalization, and in these cases infectious disease consultation is recommended. Patients with pneumonia, purulent otitis media, or tonsillitis should be treated with antibiotics.³⁵ Observational data suggest antibiotics may reduce the occurrence of bacterial infection in children, but there are no usage guidelines.³⁵ Vitamin A supplementation has been associated with a 50% decrease in morbidity and mortality and with blindness prevention.²² This supplementation should be considered in severe measles cases (all hospitalized patients), especially for children, regardless of country of residence, and for adult patients who exhibit clinical signs of vitamin A deficiency.^22,24

Antiviral Treatment

No specific treatment is available.³⁶ Ribavirin demonstrates in vitro activity against the virus, but the Food and Drug Administration has not approved the drug for treatment of measles. Ribavirin has been used for cases of severe measles, and for patients with SSPE along with intrathecal interferon alpha. This antiviral treatment is considered experimental.³⁷

All patients hospitalized with measles infection should be cautioned about the potential downstream complications of the disease and should follow up with their primary care physician for surveillance after discharge.³⁸

If measles symptoms develop, patients should self-quarantine and contact their primary care physician or public health department as soon as possible. Regardless of immune status, family members and other exposed persons should be educated about the measles symptoms that may occur during the 21 days after exposure.³⁸

Both suspected and confirmed cases of measles should be reported immediately to local public health authorities.

Infection Control and Prophylaxis

Current guidelines recommend 2 doses of measles-containing vaccine to all adults at higher risk for contracting measles: international travelers, healthcare personnel, and high school and college students. Infants 6 or 11 months old should receive 1 MMR dose before international travel.^1,38

Strict airborne isolation—use of N95 respirator or respirator with similar effectiveness in preventing airborne transmission—is mandatory from 3 to 5 days before rash onset to 4 days after rash onset (immunocompetent patients) or for the duration of the disease (immunocompromised patients).³⁸

Healthcare workers should have documented presumptive evidence of immunity to measles.³⁹ Healthcare providers without evidence of immunity should be excused from work from day 5 to day 21 of exposure, even if they have received postexposure vaccine or intramuscular immunoglobulin. They should be offered the first MMR dose within 72 hours of measles exposure to prevent or modify the disease. Susceptible family members or visitors should not be allowed in the patient’s room.¹

Postexposure Prophylaxis

Standard MMR vaccination within 72 hours after exposure may protect against disease in people without a contraindication to measles vaccine. The public health department usually identifies these individuals and provides postexposure prophylaxis recommendations.^38,39

People with HIV, patients receiving immunosuppressive therapy, and pregnant women and infants who have been exposed to measles and who are at risk for developing morbid disease can be treated with immunoglobulin (IG). If administered within 6 days of exposure, IG can prevent or modify disease in people who are unvaccinated or severely immunocompromised (ie, not immune). The recommended dose of IG administered intramuscularly is 0.5 mL/kg of body weight (maximum, 15 mL), and the recommended dose of IG given intravenously is 400 mg/kg. Anyone heavier than 30 kg would require intravenous IG to achieve adequate antibody levels.

Physicians should not vaccinate pregnant women, patients with severe immunosuppression from disease or therapy, patients with moderate or severe illness, and people with a history of severe allergic reaction to the vaccine.^1,40 The measles vaccine should be deferred for 6 months after IG administration.³⁶ More details are available in the recommendations made by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.¹

Although rare in the United States, measles remains a common and potentially devastating infection among patients who have not been vaccinated. Diagnosis requires clinical suspicion, engagement of public health authorities, and judicious use of laboratory testing. Hospitalists may encounter infectious and neurologic complications of measles long after the initial infection and should be aware of these associations.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

Measles is a highly contagious acute respiratory illness that includes a characteristic rash. After exposure, up to 90% of susceptible persons develop measles.¹ Even though it is considered a childhood illness, measles can affect people of all age groups. Measles continues to be major health problem around the world, despite the availability of a safe and effective vaccine, and it remains one of the leading causes of childhood mortality, with nearly 115,000 deaths reported by the World Health Organization² in 2014. In 2000, measles was declared eliminated from the United States, but outbreaks still occasionally occur.^3-6

The disease is self-limited, but some patients develop complications that may require hospitalization for treatment. People at highest risk for complications are children younger than 5 years, adults older than 20 years, pregnant women, and immunocompromised individuals.⁷

During the licensure of live measles vaccine in 1963, an average of 549,000 measles cases and 495 measles deaths, as well as 48,000 hospitalizations and 4000 encephalitis cases, were reported annually in the United States. Almost all Americans were affected by measles by adolescence.

Implementation of the 1-dose vaccine program substantially reduced reported incidence in the United States by 1988, and led to a dramatic decline in measles-related hospitalizations and deaths.^3-6 The 2-dose MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccination was introduced in 1989, and measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000.^3-6

National–level one-dose MMR coverage among children 19-35 months has remained above 90% during the last two decades.⁸ NIS-Teen vaccination coverage data for 13- to 17-year-olds since 2008 has been near or above 90%,⁹ and 94% of children enrolled in kindergarten had evidence of 2 MMR doses in the 2014-2015 school year.¹⁰

A large multistate measles outbreak was reported in the United States in 2014-2015.^4,11 One hundred fifty-nine cases were reported in the United States between January 4 and April 5, 2015. The majority of patients either were unvaccinated (45%) or had an unknown vaccination status (38%). Age ranged from 6 weeks to 70 years, and 22 patients (14%) were hospitalized.⁴

Measles is caused by an RNA-containing paramyxovirus that is spread by the respiratory route. Average incubation period from exposure to rash onset is 14 days (range, 7-21 days).^12,13 Peak infectivity occurs during the prodromal phase, before rash onset (Figure 1), but patients are infectious from 4 days before rash onset through 4 days after rash onset.^7,12,13

The disease prodrome consists of a high fever (39°C-40.5°C), coryza, cough, and conjunctivitis followed by Koplik spots (Figure 2A). Koplik spots are pathognomonic for measles but rarely discovered. They appear before the skin rash alongside second molars on the buccal surface of the cheeks. The spots usually disappear when the characteristic maculopapular, nonpruritic rash erupts initially at the hairline and behind the ears, and within four days progresses toward the trunk and limbs, including the palms and soles (Figures 2B, 2C).

The presenting symptoms of primary measles infection are nonspecific, particularly if Koplik spots are not identified. The differential diagnosis for a patient who presents with high fever and rash include Kawasaki disease, dengue, parvovirus B19, serum sickness, syphilis, systemic lupus erythematous, toxic shock syndrome, enterovirus infection, human herpes virus 6 (roseola), viral hemorrhagic fever, drug eruption, infectious mononucleosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, rubella, scarlet fever, chikungunya, and Zika virus infection.

Measles complications can affect nearly every organ system (Table). Rates of complications from measles infection depend on age and underlying condition. Coexisting vitamin A deficiency increases complication rates.²⁰

Bacterial infections in the setting of measles infection are more common in adults than in children, and are more severe among people who are malnourished or have an immunodeficiency disorder. The most common infectious complications, which involve the respiratory tract, include pneumonia, laryngotracheitis (“measles croup”), bronchitis, otitis media (most common complication among children in the United States), and sinusitis.^7,13,21

Indications for hospitalizing children include respiratory distress, laryngeal obstruction, dehydration that requires intravenous fluids, diarrhea with more than 10 stools a day or bloody stool, severe anemia, altered mental status, convulsion, severe rash with developing hemorrhagic areas, extensive mouth ulcers, corneal clouding or ulcers, visual disturbance, and mastoiditis.²²

Pneumonia is a common indication for hospitalizing adults.^23,24 Measles-associated interstitial giant cell (Hecht) pneumonia is most often recognized among immunocompromised and malnourished patients.¹³ Primary pneumonia is caused by the measles virus, but bacterial superinfection can occur. The most common bacterial pathogens include Streptococcus, Pneumococcus, and Staphylococcus,^13,24 and less commonly isolated organisms include gram-negative bacteria, such as Haemophilus influenzae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Neisseria meningitides, and Enterobacter cloacae.²³

Uncommon complications of measles are myocarditis, glomerulonephritis, acute renal failure, and thrombocytopenic purpura.^25,26

Neurologic complications in measles are an important concern. Measles-associated central nervous system complications are considered a result of an immune-mediated reaction to myelin protein and not from direct viral insult.^26-28 Immunocompromised patients are at risk for developing fatal encephalitis, and those who survive often experience cognitive decline or seizures.

Measles is associated with four different encephalitic diseases: primary measles encephalitis, acute post-measles encephalomyelitis, measles inclusion body encephalitis, and subacute sclerosing panencephalitis.

Primary measles encephalitis is characterized by fever, headache, stiff neck, and meningeal signs. Onset occurs between 1 and 15 days after rash onset, and the disease affects 1/1000 patients. Seizure, altered mental status, and coma can also develop. Viral RNA detection in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) confirms the diagnosis.²⁹Acute post-measles encephalomyelitis is more common in adults than in children.¹² It typically develops after the rash fades and the other symptoms subside. Patients suddenly experience a recurrence of fevers or seizures. Deafness, intellectual decline, epilepsy, postencephalitic hyperkinesia, hemiplegia, and/or paraplegia also can develop.^27-29

Measles inclusion body encephalitis is described only in immunocompromised patients, and onset occurs within 1 year of infection. Seizures are an initial and common symptom, and some patients also experience hemiplegia, stupor, hypertonia, and dysarthria.²⁹ Diagnostic findings include seroconversion during the disease course, improvement after withholding of the immunosuppressive regimen, and normal CSF. Brain biopsy confirms the diagnosis.

Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a slowly progressing and untreatable degenerative neurologic disorder characterized by demyelination of multiple brain areas. SSPE develops 7 to 10 years after natural measles infection, and usually affects children or adolescents. Clinical presentation includes intellectual decline, frequent rhythmic myoclonic jerks, seizure, and dementia. As the disease progresses, coma, quadriplegia, vegetative state, and autonomic instability develop. Death usually occurs within 2 years of onset.^30,31 In children, the risk for SSPE after measles infection is estimated to be 4 to 11 per 100,000 infections. After the 1989-1991 resurgence of measles in the United States, however, the risk for SSPE was estimated to be 22 per 100,000 infections.^30-32 The pathogenesis of SSPE is not fully understood but is thought to result from persistent aberrant measles virus infection.³²

The SSPE diagnosis is based on clinical presentation, presence of anti-measles antibodies in CSF, typical electroencephalography pattern (periodic paroxysmal bursts) with accompanying myoclonus, tissue analysis, and magnetic resonance imaging.³⁰

Suspicion for measles should prompt immediate consultation with local or state public health officials. Laboratory testing can be carefully considered after consultation, and care is needed in interpreting serologic studies.

The mainstays of measles infection diagnosis are detection of viral RNA by reverse transcriptase–polymerase chain reaction, or isolation of the virus in the clinical specimen, and detection of measles-specific IgM (immunoglobulin M) antibodies. A detailed protocol for collecting specimens for viral isolation appears on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website (http://www.cdc.gov/measles/lab-tools/rt-pcr.html).

IgM antibodies are detectable over the 15 weeks after rash onset, but the recommendation is to collect serum between 72 hours and 4 weeks after rash onset.³³ Clinicians should be aware that false-positive IgM results may occur with rheumatologic diseases, parvovirus B19 infection, rubella, and infectious mononucleosis.

IgG (immunoglobulin G) antibodies are usually detectable a week after rash onset. The laboratory can confirm measles by detecting more than a 4-fold increase in IgG titers between the acute phase and the convalescent phase. After measles infection, most adults develop lifelong immunity with positive IgG serology.³⁴

Additional tests, such as IgG avidity and plaque reduction neutralization assay, can be used to confirm suspected cases in previously vaccinated individuals.³⁴

General Principles

Uncomplicated measles treatment is supportive and includes oral fluids and antipyretics.^7,22 Severe bacterial infections, encephalitis, or dehydration may require hospitalization, and in these cases infectious disease consultation is recommended. Patients with pneumonia, purulent otitis media, or tonsillitis should be treated with antibiotics.³⁵ Observational data suggest antibiotics may reduce the occurrence of bacterial infection in children, but there are no usage guidelines.³⁵ Vitamin A supplementation has been associated with a 50% decrease in morbidity and mortality and with blindness prevention.²² This supplementation should be considered in severe measles cases (all hospitalized patients), especially for children, regardless of country of residence, and for adult patients who exhibit clinical signs of vitamin A deficiency.^22,24

Antiviral Treatment

No specific treatment is available.³⁶ Ribavirin demonstrates in vitro activity against the virus, but the Food and Drug Administration has not approved the drug for treatment of measles. Ribavirin has been used for cases of severe measles, and for patients with SSPE along with intrathecal interferon alpha. This antiviral treatment is considered experimental.³⁷

All patients hospitalized with measles infection should be cautioned about the potential downstream complications of the disease and should follow up with their primary care physician for surveillance after discharge.³⁸

If measles symptoms develop, patients should self-quarantine and contact their primary care physician or public health department as soon as possible. Regardless of immune status, family members and other exposed persons should be educated about the measles symptoms that may occur during the 21 days after exposure.³⁸

Both suspected and confirmed cases of measles should be reported immediately to local public health authorities.

Infection Control and Prophylaxis

Current guidelines recommend 2 doses of measles-containing vaccine to all adults at higher risk for contracting measles: international travelers, healthcare personnel, and high school and college students. Infants 6 or 11 months old should receive 1 MMR dose before international travel.^1,38

Strict airborne isolation—use of N95 respirator or respirator with similar effectiveness in preventing airborne transmission—is mandatory from 3 to 5 days before rash onset to 4 days after rash onset (immunocompetent patients) or for the duration of the disease (immunocompromised patients).³⁸

Healthcare workers should have documented presumptive evidence of immunity to measles.³⁹ Healthcare providers without evidence of immunity should be excused from work from day 5 to day 21 of exposure, even if they have received postexposure vaccine or intramuscular immunoglobulin. They should be offered the first MMR dose within 72 hours of measles exposure to prevent or modify the disease. Susceptible family members or visitors should not be allowed in the patient’s room.¹

Postexposure Prophylaxis

Standard MMR vaccination within 72 hours after exposure may protect against disease in people without a contraindication to measles vaccine. The public health department usually identifies these individuals and provides postexposure prophylaxis recommendations.^38,39

People with HIV, patients receiving immunosuppressive therapy, and pregnant women and infants who have been exposed to measles and who are at risk for developing morbid disease can be treated with immunoglobulin (IG). If administered within 6 days of exposure, IG can prevent or modify disease in people who are unvaccinated or severely immunocompromised (ie, not immune). The recommended dose of IG administered intramuscularly is 0.5 mL/kg of body weight (maximum, 15 mL), and the recommended dose of IG given intravenously is 400 mg/kg. Anyone heavier than 30 kg would require intravenous IG to achieve adequate antibody levels.

Physicians should not vaccinate pregnant women, patients with severe immunosuppression from disease or therapy, patients with moderate or severe illness, and people with a history of severe allergic reaction to the vaccine.^1,40 The measles vaccine should be deferred for 6 months after IG administration.³⁶ More details are available in the recommendations made by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.¹

Although rare in the United States, measles remains a common and potentially devastating infection among patients who have not been vaccinated. Diagnosis requires clinical suspicion, engagement of public health authorities, and judicious use of laboratory testing. Hospitalists may encounter infectious and neurologic complications of measles long after the initial infection and should be aware of these associations.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

Mobility impairment (reduced ability to change body position or ambulate) is common among older adults during hospitalization¹ and is correlated with higher rates of readmission,² long-term care placement,³ and even death.⁴ Although some may perceive mobility impairment during hospitalization as a temporary inconvenience, recent research suggests disruptions of basic activities of daily life such as mobility may be “traumatic” ⁵ or “toxic”⁶ to older adults with long-term post-hospital effects.⁷ While these studies highlight the underestimated effects of low mobility during hospitalization, they are based on data collected for research purposes using mobility measurement tools not typically utilized in routine hospital care.

The absence of a standardized mobility measurement tool used as part of routine hospital care poses a barrier to estimating the effects of low hospital mobility and programs seeking to improve mobility levels in hospitalized patients. In this issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Valiani et al.⁸ found a novel approach to measure mobility using a universally disseminated clinical scale (Braden). Using the activity subscale of the Braden scale, the authors found that mobility level changes during hospitalization can have a striking impact on post-discharge mortality. Their results indicate that older adults who develop mobility impairment during hospitalization had higher odds of death, specifically 1.23 times greater risk, within 6 months after discharge (23% decreased chance of survival). Most of the risk applies in the first 30 days and remains to a lesser extent for up to 5 years post-hospitalization. An equally interesting finding was that those who enter the hospital with low mobility but improve have a 46% higher survival rate. Again, most of the benefit is seen during hospitalization or immediately afterward, but the benefit persists for up to 5 years. A schematic of the results are presented in the Figure. Notably, Valiani et al.⁸ did not find regression to the mean Braden score of 3.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

Mobility impairment (reduced ability to change body position or ambulate) is common among older adults during hospitalization¹ and is correlated with higher rates of readmission,² long-term care placement,³ and even death.⁴ Although some may perceive mobility impairment during hospitalization as a temporary inconvenience, recent research suggests disruptions of basic activities of daily life such as mobility may be “traumatic” ⁵ or “toxic”⁶ to older adults with long-term post-hospital effects.⁷ While these studies highlight the underestimated effects of low mobility during hospitalization, they are based on data collected for research purposes using mobility measurement tools not typically utilized in routine hospital care.

The absence of a standardized mobility measurement tool used as part of routine hospital care poses a barrier to estimating the effects of low hospital mobility and programs seeking to improve mobility levels in hospitalized patients. In this issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Valiani et al.⁸ found a novel approach to measure mobility using a universally disseminated clinical scale (Braden). Using the activity subscale of the Braden scale, the authors found that mobility level changes during hospitalization can have a striking impact on post-discharge mortality. Their results indicate that older adults who develop mobility impairment during hospitalization had higher odds of death, specifically 1.23 times greater risk, within 6 months after discharge (23% decreased chance of survival). Most of the risk applies in the first 30 days and remains to a lesser extent for up to 5 years post-hospitalization. An equally interesting finding was that those who enter the hospital with low mobility but improve have a 46% higher survival rate. Again, most of the benefit is seen during hospitalization or immediately afterward, but the benefit persists for up to 5 years. A schematic of the results are presented in the Figure. Notably, Valiani et al.⁸ did not find regression to the mean Braden score of 3.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

Mobility impairment (reduced ability to change body position or ambulate) is common among older adults during hospitalization¹ and is correlated with higher rates of readmission,² long-term care placement,³ and even death.⁴ Although some may perceive mobility impairment during hospitalization as a temporary inconvenience, recent research suggests disruptions of basic activities of daily life such as mobility may be “traumatic” ⁵ or “toxic”⁶ to older adults with long-term post-hospital effects.⁷ While these studies highlight the underestimated effects of low mobility during hospitalization, they are based on data collected for research purposes using mobility measurement tools not typically utilized in routine hospital care.

The absence of a standardized mobility measurement tool used as part of routine hospital care poses a barrier to estimating the effects of low hospital mobility and programs seeking to improve mobility levels in hospitalized patients. In this issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Valiani et al.⁸ found a novel approach to measure mobility using a universally disseminated clinical scale (Braden). Using the activity subscale of the Braden scale, the authors found that mobility level changes during hospitalization can have a striking impact on post-discharge mortality. Their results indicate that older adults who develop mobility impairment during hospitalization had higher odds of death, specifically 1.23 times greater risk, within 6 months after discharge (23% decreased chance of survival). Most of the risk applies in the first 30 days and remains to a lesser extent for up to 5 years post-hospitalization. An equally interesting finding was that those who enter the hospital with low mobility but improve have a 46% higher survival rate. Again, most of the benefit is seen during hospitalization or immediately afterward, but the benefit persists for up to 5 years. A schematic of the results are presented in the Figure. Notably, Valiani et al.⁸ did not find regression to the mean Braden score of 3.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

Imagine you’re on call in a busy emergency department (ED) overnight. Things are tough. The consults are piling up, no one is returning your calls for collateral information, and you’re dealing with a myriad of emergencies.

In walks Mr. D, age 45, complaining of hearing voices, feeling unsafe, and asking for admission. It’s now 2 am. What would you do?

Of course, like all qualified psychiatrists, you will dig a little deeper, and in doing so you learn that Mr. D has visited this hospital before and has been admitted to the psychiatry unit. Now you go from having a dearth of information to having more records than you can count.

You discover that Mr. D has a history of coming to the ED during precarious hours, with similar complaints, demanding admission.

Mr. D, you learn, is unemployed, single, and homeless. Your meticulous search through his hospital records and previous admission and discharge notes reveal that once he has slept for a night, eaten a hot meal, and received narcotics for his back pain and benzodiazepines for his “symptoms” he demands to leave the hospital. His psychotic symptoms disappear despite his consistent refusal to take antipsychotics throughout his stay.

Now, what would you do?

As earnest medical students and psychiatrists, we enjoy helping patients on their path toward recovery. We want to advocate for our patients and give them the benefit of the doubt. We’re taught in medical school to be non-judgmental and invite patients to share their narrative. But through experience, we start to become aware of malingering.

Suspecting malingering, diagnosed as a condition, often is avoided by psychiatrists.¹ This makes sense—it goes against the essence of our training and imposes a pejorative label on someone who has reached out for help.

Often persons with mental illness will suffer for years until they to receive help.² That’s exactly why, when patients like Mr. D come to the ED and report hearing voices, we’re not likely to shout, “Liar!” and invite them to leave.

However, malingering is a real problem, especially because the number of psychiatric hospital beds have dwindled to record lows, thereby overcrowding EDs. Resources are skimpy, and clinicians want to help those who need it the most and not waste resources on someone who is “faking it” for secondary gain.

To navigate this diagnostic challenge, psychiatrists need the skills to detect malingering and the confidence to deal with it appropriately. This article aims to:

• define psychosis and malingering
• review the prevalence and historical considerations of malingering
• offer practical strategies to deal with malingering.

Clinicians first must have the clinical acumen and expertise to identify a true mental illness such as psychosis² (Table 1). The differential diagnosis for psychotic symptoms is broad. The astute clinician might suspect that untreated bipolar disorder or depression led to the emergence of perceptual disturbances or disordered thinking. Transient psychotic symptoms can be associated with trauma disorders, borderline personality disorder, and acute intoxication. Psychotic spectrum disorders range from brief psychosis to schizophreniform to schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia.

Malingering—which is a condition, not a diagnosis—is characterized by the intentional production of false or grossly exaggerated physical or psychological symptoms motivated by external incentives.^3,4 The presence of external incentives differentiates malingering from true psychiatric disorders, including factitious disorder, somatoform disorder, and dissociative disorder, and specific medical conditions.¹ In those disorders, there is no external incentive.

It is important to remember that malingering can coexist with a serious mental illness. For example, a truly psychotic person might malinger, feign, or exaggerate symptoms to try to receive much needed help. Individuals with true psychosis might have become disenchanted with the mental health system, and thereby have a tendency to over-report or exaggerate symptoms in an effort to obtain treatment. This also could explain why many clinicians intuitively are reluctant to make the determination that someone is malingering. Malingering also can be present in an individual who has antisocial personality disorder, factitious disorder, Ganser syndrome, and Munchausen syndrome.⁴ When symptoms or diseases that either are thought to be exaggerated or do not exist, consider a diagnosis of malingering.

A key challenge in any discussion of abnormal health care–seeking behavior is the extent to which a person’s reported symptoms are considered to be a product of choice, psychopathology beyond volitional control, or perhaps both. Clinical skills alone typically are not sufficient for diagnosing or detecting malingering. Medical education needs to provide doctors with the conceptual, developmental, and management frameworks to understand and manage patients whose symptoms appear to be simulated. Central to understanding factitious disorders and malingering are the explanatory models and beliefs used to provide meaning for both patients and doctors.⁷

When considering malingered psychosis, the suspecting physician must stay alert to possible motives. Also, the patient’s presentation might provide some clues when there is marked variability, such as discrepancies in the history, gross inconsistencies, or blatant contradictions. Hallucinations are a heterogeneous experience, and discerning between true vs feigned symptoms can be challenging for even the seasoned clinician. It can be helpful to study the phenomenology of typical vs atypical hallucinatory symptoms.⁸ Examples of atypical symptoms include:

• vague hallucinations
• experiencing hallucinations of only 1 sensory modality (such as voices alone, visual images in black and white only)
• delusions that have an abrupt onset
• bizarre content without disordered thinking.^2,6,9,10

The truth about an untruthful condition

Although the exact prevalence of malingering varies by circumstance, Rissmiller et al^12,13 demonstrated—and later replicated—a prevalence of approximately 10% among patients hospitalized for suicidal ideation or suicide attempts. Studies have demonstrated even higher prevalence within forensic populations, which seems reasonable because evading criminal responsibility is a large incentive to feign symptoms. Studies also have shown that 5% of military recruits will feign symptoms to avoid service. Moreover, 1% of psychiatric patients, such as Mr. D, feign symptoms for secondary gain.¹³

Although there are no psychometrically validated assessment tools to distinguish between real vs feigned hallucinations, several standardized tests can help tease out the truth.⁹ The preferred personality test used in forensic settings is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,¹⁴ which consists of 567 items, with 10 clinical scales and several validity scales. The F scale, “faking good” or “faking bad,” detects people who are answering questions with the goal of appearing better or worse than they actually are. In studies of patients hospitalized for being at risk for suicide who were administered tests of self-reported malingering, approximately 10% of people admitted to psychiatric units were “faking” their symptoms.¹⁴

It is important to identify malingering from a professional and public health standpoint. Society incurs incremental costs when a person uses dwindling mental health resources for their own reward, leaving others to suffer without treatment. The number of psychiatric hospital beds has fallen from half a million in the 1950s to approximately 100,000 today.¹⁵

Practical guidelines

Malingering presents specific challenges to clinicians, such as:

• diagnostic uncertainty
• inaccurately branding one a liar
• countertransference
• personal reactions.

Our ethical and fiduciary responsibility is to our patient. In examining the art in medicine, it has been suggested that malingering could be viewed as an immature or primitive defense.¹⁶

Although there often is suspicion that a person is malingering, a definitive statement of such must be confirmed. Without clarity, labeling an individual as a malingerer could have detrimental effects to his (her) future care, defames his character, and places a thoughtless examiner at risk of a lawsuit. Confirmation can be achieved by observation or psychological testing methods.

Observation. When in doubt of what to do with someone such as Mr. D, there is little harm in acting prudently by holding him in a controlled setting—whether keeping him overnight in an ED or admitting him for a brief psychiatric stay. By observing someone in a controlled environment, where there are multiple professional watchful eyes, inferences will be more accurate.¹

Structured assessments have been developed to help detect malingering—one example is the Test of Memory Malingering—however, in daily practice, the physician generally should suspect malingering when there are tangible incentives and when reported symptoms do not match the physical examination or there is no organic basis for the physical complaints.¹⁷ Detecting illness deception relies on converging evidence sources, including detailed interview assessments, clinical notes, and consultations.⁷

When you feel certain that you are encountering someone who is malingering, the final step is to get a consult. Malingering is a serious label and warrants due diligence by the provider, rather than a haphazard guess that a patient is lying. Once you receive confirmatory opinions, great care should be taken in documenting a clear and accurate note that will benefit your clinical counterpart who might encounter a patient such as Mr. D when he (she) shows up again, and will go a long way toward appropriately directing his care.

Imagine you’re on call in a busy emergency department (ED) overnight. Things are tough. The consults are piling up, no one is returning your calls for collateral information, and you’re dealing with a myriad of emergencies.

In walks Mr. D, age 45, complaining of hearing voices, feeling unsafe, and asking for admission. It’s now 2 am. What would you do?

Of course, like all qualified psychiatrists, you will dig a little deeper, and in doing so you learn that Mr. D has visited this hospital before and has been admitted to the psychiatry unit. Now you go from having a dearth of information to having more records than you can count.

You discover that Mr. D has a history of coming to the ED during precarious hours, with similar complaints, demanding admission.

Mr. D, you learn, is unemployed, single, and homeless. Your meticulous search through his hospital records and previous admission and discharge notes reveal that once he has slept for a night, eaten a hot meal, and received narcotics for his back pain and benzodiazepines for his “symptoms” he demands to leave the hospital. His psychotic symptoms disappear despite his consistent refusal to take antipsychotics throughout his stay.

Now, what would you do?

As earnest medical students and psychiatrists, we enjoy helping patients on their path toward recovery. We want to advocate for our patients and give them the benefit of the doubt. We’re taught in medical school to be non-judgmental and invite patients to share their narrative. But through experience, we start to become aware of malingering.

Suspecting malingering, diagnosed as a condition, often is avoided by psychiatrists.¹ This makes sense—it goes against the essence of our training and imposes a pejorative label on someone who has reached out for help.

Often persons with mental illness will suffer for years until they to receive help.² That’s exactly why, when patients like Mr. D come to the ED and report hearing voices, we’re not likely to shout, “Liar!” and invite them to leave.

However, malingering is a real problem, especially because the number of psychiatric hospital beds have dwindled to record lows, thereby overcrowding EDs. Resources are skimpy, and clinicians want to help those who need it the most and not waste resources on someone who is “faking it” for secondary gain.

To navigate this diagnostic challenge, psychiatrists need the skills to detect malingering and the confidence to deal with it appropriately. This article aims to:

• define psychosis and malingering
• review the prevalence and historical considerations of malingering
• offer practical strategies to deal with malingering.

Clinicians first must have the clinical acumen and expertise to identify a true mental illness such as psychosis² (Table 1). The differential diagnosis for psychotic symptoms is broad. The astute clinician might suspect that untreated bipolar disorder or depression led to the emergence of perceptual disturbances or disordered thinking. Transient psychotic symptoms can be associated with trauma disorders, borderline personality disorder, and acute intoxication. Psychotic spectrum disorders range from brief psychosis to schizophreniform to schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia.

Malingering—which is a condition, not a diagnosis—is characterized by the intentional production of false or grossly exaggerated physical or psychological symptoms motivated by external incentives.^3,4 The presence of external incentives differentiates malingering from true psychiatric disorders, including factitious disorder, somatoform disorder, and dissociative disorder, and specific medical conditions.¹ In those disorders, there is no external incentive.

It is important to remember that malingering can coexist with a serious mental illness. For example, a truly psychotic person might malinger, feign, or exaggerate symptoms to try to receive much needed help. Individuals with true psychosis might have become disenchanted with the mental health system, and thereby have a tendency to over-report or exaggerate symptoms in an effort to obtain treatment. This also could explain why many clinicians intuitively are reluctant to make the determination that someone is malingering. Malingering also can be present in an individual who has antisocial personality disorder, factitious disorder, Ganser syndrome, and Munchausen syndrome.⁴ When symptoms or diseases that either are thought to be exaggerated or do not exist, consider a diagnosis of malingering.

A key challenge in any discussion of abnormal health care–seeking behavior is the extent to which a person’s reported symptoms are considered to be a product of choice, psychopathology beyond volitional control, or perhaps both. Clinical skills alone typically are not sufficient for diagnosing or detecting malingering. Medical education needs to provide doctors with the conceptual, developmental, and management frameworks to understand and manage patients whose symptoms appear to be simulated. Central to understanding factitious disorders and malingering are the explanatory models and beliefs used to provide meaning for both patients and doctors.⁷

When considering malingered psychosis, the suspecting physician must stay alert to possible motives. Also, the patient’s presentation might provide some clues when there is marked variability, such as discrepancies in the history, gross inconsistencies, or blatant contradictions. Hallucinations are a heterogeneous experience, and discerning between true vs feigned symptoms can be challenging for even the seasoned clinician. It can be helpful to study the phenomenology of typical vs atypical hallucinatory symptoms.⁸ Examples of atypical symptoms include:

• vague hallucinations
• experiencing hallucinations of only 1 sensory modality (such as voices alone, visual images in black and white only)
• delusions that have an abrupt onset
• bizarre content without disordered thinking.^2,6,9,10

The truth about an untruthful condition

Although the exact prevalence of malingering varies by circumstance, Rissmiller et al^12,13 demonstrated—and later replicated—a prevalence of approximately 10% among patients hospitalized for suicidal ideation or suicide attempts. Studies have demonstrated even higher prevalence within forensic populations, which seems reasonable because evading criminal responsibility is a large incentive to feign symptoms. Studies also have shown that 5% of military recruits will feign symptoms to avoid service. Moreover, 1% of psychiatric patients, such as Mr. D, feign symptoms for secondary gain.¹³

Although there are no psychometrically validated assessment tools to distinguish between real vs feigned hallucinations, several standardized tests can help tease out the truth.⁹ The preferred personality test used in forensic settings is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,¹⁴ which consists of 567 items, with 10 clinical scales and several validity scales. The F scale, “faking good” or “faking bad,” detects people who are answering questions with the goal of appearing better or worse than they actually are. In studies of patients hospitalized for being at risk for suicide who were administered tests of self-reported malingering, approximately 10% of people admitted to psychiatric units were “faking” their symptoms.¹⁴

It is important to identify malingering from a professional and public health standpoint. Society incurs incremental costs when a person uses dwindling mental health resources for their own reward, leaving others to suffer without treatment. The number of psychiatric hospital beds has fallen from half a million in the 1950s to approximately 100,000 today.¹⁵

Practical guidelines

Malingering presents specific challenges to clinicians, such as:

• diagnostic uncertainty
• inaccurately branding one a liar
• countertransference
• personal reactions.

Our ethical and fiduciary responsibility is to our patient. In examining the art in medicine, it has been suggested that malingering could be viewed as an immature or primitive defense.¹⁶

Although there often is suspicion that a person is malingering, a definitive statement of such must be confirmed. Without clarity, labeling an individual as a malingerer could have detrimental effects to his (her) future care, defames his character, and places a thoughtless examiner at risk of a lawsuit. Confirmation can be achieved by observation or psychological testing methods.

Observation. When in doubt of what to do with someone such as Mr. D, there is little harm in acting prudently by holding him in a controlled setting—whether keeping him overnight in an ED or admitting him for a brief psychiatric stay. By observing someone in a controlled environment, where there are multiple professional watchful eyes, inferences will be more accurate.¹

Structured assessments have been developed to help detect malingering—one example is the Test of Memory Malingering—however, in daily practice, the physician generally should suspect malingering when there are tangible incentives and when reported symptoms do not match the physical examination or there is no organic basis for the physical complaints.¹⁷ Detecting illness deception relies on converging evidence sources, including detailed interview assessments, clinical notes, and consultations.⁷

When you feel certain that you are encountering someone who is malingering, the final step is to get a consult. Malingering is a serious label and warrants due diligence by the provider, rather than a haphazard guess that a patient is lying. Once you receive confirmatory opinions, great care should be taken in documenting a clear and accurate note that will benefit your clinical counterpart who might encounter a patient such as Mr. D when he (she) shows up again, and will go a long way toward appropriately directing his care.

Imagine you’re on call in a busy emergency department (ED) overnight. Things are tough. The consults are piling up, no one is returning your calls for collateral information, and you’re dealing with a myriad of emergencies.

In walks Mr. D, age 45, complaining of hearing voices, feeling unsafe, and asking for admission. It’s now 2 am. What would you do?

Of course, like all qualified psychiatrists, you will dig a little deeper, and in doing so you learn that Mr. D has visited this hospital before and has been admitted to the psychiatry unit. Now you go from having a dearth of information to having more records than you can count.

You discover that Mr. D has a history of coming to the ED during precarious hours, with similar complaints, demanding admission.

Mr. D, you learn, is unemployed, single, and homeless. Your meticulous search through his hospital records and previous admission and discharge notes reveal that once he has slept for a night, eaten a hot meal, and received narcotics for his back pain and benzodiazepines for his “symptoms” he demands to leave the hospital. His psychotic symptoms disappear despite his consistent refusal to take antipsychotics throughout his stay.

Now, what would you do?

As earnest medical students and psychiatrists, we enjoy helping patients on their path toward recovery. We want to advocate for our patients and give them the benefit of the doubt. We’re taught in medical school to be non-judgmental and invite patients to share their narrative. But through experience, we start to become aware of malingering.

Suspecting malingering, diagnosed as a condition, often is avoided by psychiatrists.¹ This makes sense—it goes against the essence of our training and imposes a pejorative label on someone who has reached out for help.

Often persons with mental illness will suffer for years until they to receive help.² That’s exactly why, when patients like Mr. D come to the ED and report hearing voices, we’re not likely to shout, “Liar!” and invite them to leave.

However, malingering is a real problem, especially because the number of psychiatric hospital beds have dwindled to record lows, thereby overcrowding EDs. Resources are skimpy, and clinicians want to help those who need it the most and not waste resources on someone who is “faking it” for secondary gain.

To navigate this diagnostic challenge, psychiatrists need the skills to detect malingering and the confidence to deal with it appropriately. This article aims to:

• define psychosis and malingering
• review the prevalence and historical considerations of malingering
• offer practical strategies to deal with malingering.

Clinicians first must have the clinical acumen and expertise to identify a true mental illness such as psychosis² (Table 1). The differential diagnosis for psychotic symptoms is broad. The astute clinician might suspect that untreated bipolar disorder or depression led to the emergence of perceptual disturbances or disordered thinking. Transient psychotic symptoms can be associated with trauma disorders, borderline personality disorder, and acute intoxication. Psychotic spectrum disorders range from brief psychosis to schizophreniform to schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia.

Malingering—which is a condition, not a diagnosis—is characterized by the intentional production of false or grossly exaggerated physical or psychological symptoms motivated by external incentives.^3,4 The presence of external incentives differentiates malingering from true psychiatric disorders, including factitious disorder, somatoform disorder, and dissociative disorder, and specific medical conditions.¹ In those disorders, there is no external incentive.

It is important to remember that malingering can coexist with a serious mental illness. For example, a truly psychotic person might malinger, feign, or exaggerate symptoms to try to receive much needed help. Individuals with true psychosis might have become disenchanted with the mental health system, and thereby have a tendency to over-report or exaggerate symptoms in an effort to obtain treatment. This also could explain why many clinicians intuitively are reluctant to make the determination that someone is malingering. Malingering also can be present in an individual who has antisocial personality disorder, factitious disorder, Ganser syndrome, and Munchausen syndrome.⁴ When symptoms or diseases that either are thought to be exaggerated or do not exist, consider a diagnosis of malingering.

A key challenge in any discussion of abnormal health care–seeking behavior is the extent to which a person’s reported symptoms are considered to be a product of choice, psychopathology beyond volitional control, or perhaps both. Clinical skills alone typically are not sufficient for diagnosing or detecting malingering. Medical education needs to provide doctors with the conceptual, developmental, and management frameworks to understand and manage patients whose symptoms appear to be simulated. Central to understanding factitious disorders and malingering are the explanatory models and beliefs used to provide meaning for both patients and doctors.⁷

When considering malingered psychosis, the suspecting physician must stay alert to possible motives. Also, the patient’s presentation might provide some clues when there is marked variability, such as discrepancies in the history, gross inconsistencies, or blatant contradictions. Hallucinations are a heterogeneous experience, and discerning between true vs feigned symptoms can be challenging for even the seasoned clinician. It can be helpful to study the phenomenology of typical vs atypical hallucinatory symptoms.⁸ Examples of atypical symptoms include:

• vague hallucinations
• experiencing hallucinations of only 1 sensory modality (such as voices alone, visual images in black and white only)
• delusions that have an abrupt onset
• bizarre content without disordered thinking.^2,6,9,10

The truth about an untruthful condition

Although the exact prevalence of malingering varies by circumstance, Rissmiller et al^12,13 demonstrated—and later replicated—a prevalence of approximately 10% among patients hospitalized for suicidal ideation or suicide attempts. Studies have demonstrated even higher prevalence within forensic populations, which seems reasonable because evading criminal responsibility is a large incentive to feign symptoms. Studies also have shown that 5% of military recruits will feign symptoms to avoid service. Moreover, 1% of psychiatric patients, such as Mr. D, feign symptoms for secondary gain.¹³

Although there are no psychometrically validated assessment tools to distinguish between real vs feigned hallucinations, several standardized tests can help tease out the truth.⁹ The preferred personality test used in forensic settings is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,¹⁴ which consists of 567 items, with 10 clinical scales and several validity scales. The F scale, “faking good” or “faking bad,” detects people who are answering questions with the goal of appearing better or worse than they actually are. In studies of patients hospitalized for being at risk for suicide who were administered tests of self-reported malingering, approximately 10% of people admitted to psychiatric units were “faking” their symptoms.¹⁴

It is important to identify malingering from a professional and public health standpoint. Society incurs incremental costs when a person uses dwindling mental health resources for their own reward, leaving others to suffer without treatment. The number of psychiatric hospital beds has fallen from half a million in the 1950s to approximately 100,000 today.¹⁵

Practical guidelines

Malingering presents specific challenges to clinicians, such as:

• diagnostic uncertainty
• inaccurately branding one a liar
• countertransference
• personal reactions.

Our ethical and fiduciary responsibility is to our patient. In examining the art in medicine, it has been suggested that malingering could be viewed as an immature or primitive defense.¹⁶

Although there often is suspicion that a person is malingering, a definitive statement of such must be confirmed. Without clarity, labeling an individual as a malingerer could have detrimental effects to his (her) future care, defames his character, and places a thoughtless examiner at risk of a lawsuit. Confirmation can be achieved by observation or psychological testing methods.

Observation. When in doubt of what to do with someone such as Mr. D, there is little harm in acting prudently by holding him in a controlled setting—whether keeping him overnight in an ED or admitting him for a brief psychiatric stay. By observing someone in a controlled environment, where there are multiple professional watchful eyes, inferences will be more accurate.¹

Structured assessments have been developed to help detect malingering—one example is the Test of Memory Malingering—however, in daily practice, the physician generally should suspect malingering when there are tangible incentives and when reported symptoms do not match the physical examination or there is no organic basis for the physical complaints.¹⁷ Detecting illness deception relies on converging evidence sources, including detailed interview assessments, clinical notes, and consultations.⁷

When you feel certain that you are encountering someone who is malingering, the final step is to get a consult. Malingering is a serious label and warrants due diligence by the provider, rather than a haphazard guess that a patient is lying. Once you receive confirmatory opinions, great care should be taken in documenting a clear and accurate note that will benefit your clinical counterpart who might encounter a patient such as Mr. D when he (she) shows up again, and will go a long way toward appropriately directing his care.

After patients have experienced an illness requiring a hospital stay, they are increasingly finding that despite having received treatment in a hospital bed, they were never actually admitted—at least not from the perspective of their insurers. Instead, these patients were kept under observation, an outpatient designation that allows a hospital to bill for observation services without formally admitting a patient.

Recent studies have recorded significant increases in hospitals’ use of observation stays among the Medicare population,^1-3 raising concerns about the financial ramifications for patients. Under observation, patients are potentially responsible for a greater share of the cost and bear the financial consequences of inappropriate observation stays. Currently, around 6% of Medicare patients hospitalized as outpatients spend more than 48 hours (or two midnights) in observation, sometimes much longer, exposing them to significant out-of-pocket costs.³ In addition, liberal use of observation can lead to increased hospital stays, for example among lower-severity emergency department (ED) patients who could have been safely discharged but were instead kept for a costly observation stay.⁴ At the same time, hospitals do not necessarily benefit from this cost shifting; in fact, hospital margin is worse for patients under Medicare observation care.⁵ Yet hospitals are obligated to be compliant with CMS observation regulations and may try to avoid the consequences (eg, audits, non-payment) for inpatient stays that are deemed inappropriate by CMS.

While the nuances of how CMS finances observation stays have made the practice controversial, the use of observation care in other payer groups that may not have the same reimbursement policies, and its impact on patients, have not been well studied. In this issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Nuckols et al.⁶ begins to address this gap by carefully exploring trends in observation stays in a multipayer data set.

The authors use data for four states (Georgia, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Tennessee) from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research) and the American Community Survey (US Census Bureau) to calculate population based rates of ED visits, observation stays, and inpatient admissions. To date, this is the first study to examine and compare the use of observation stays in an all-payer data set. Similar to prior work that examined the Medicare population, the authors find increased rates of treat-and-release ED visits and observation stays over time with a corresponding decline in inpatient admissions. As this study clearly shows, observation stays are comprising a greater fraction of the total hospital care delivered to patients with acute illnesses.

In many ways, the findings of Nuckols et al.⁶ raise more questions than they answer. For example, does the rise in observation stays represent a fundamental shift in how hospitals deliver care, an alternative to costly inpatient admissions? Are changing payer incentives driving hospitals to be more prudent in their inpatient admission practices, or are similar services simply being delivered under a new billing designation? And, most important, does this shift have any repercussions for the quality and safety of patient care?

Ultimately, the answer to these questions is, “It depends.” As the authors mention, most US hospitals admit observation patients to general medical wards, where they receive care at the admitting provider’s discretion instead of utilizing specific care pathways or observation protocols.⁷ In some of these hospitals, there may be little to no difference in how the observation patient is treated compared with a similar patient who is hospitalized as an inpatient.

However, a minority of hospitals has been more strategic in their delivery of observation care and have developed observation units. While observation units vary in design, common features include a dedicated location in the hospital with dedicated staff, reliance on clear inclusion-exclusion criteria for admission to the unit, and the use of rapid diagnostic or treatment protocols for a limited number of conditions. About half of these observation units are ED-based, reducing transitions of care between services. Protocol-driven observation units have the potential to prevent unnecessary inpatient admissions, standardize evidence-based practice, and reduce practice variation and resource use, apparently without increasing adverse events.⁸ In addition, they may also lead to better experiences of care for many patients compared with inpatient admissions.

Medicare’s own policy on observation hospital care succinctly describes ED observation units: “Observation services are commonly ordered for patients who present to the emergency department and who then require a significant period of treatment in order to make a decision concerning their admission or discharge…usually in less than 24 hours.” Due to regulatory changes and auditing pressure, observation care has expanded beyond this definition in length of stay, scope, and practice such that much of observation care now occurs on general hospital wards. Ideally, observation policy must be realigned with its original intent and investment made in ED observation units.

The shifting landscape of hospital-based care as described by Nuckols et al.⁶ highlights the need for a more strategic approach to the delivery of acute care. Unfortunately, to date, there has been a lack of attention among policymakers towards promoting a system of emergent and urgent care that is coordinated and efficient. Observation stays are one major area for which innovations in the acute care delivery system may result in meaningful improvement in patient outcomes and greater value for the healthcare system. Incentivizing a system of high-value observation care, such as promoting the use of observation units that employ evidence-based practices, should be a key priority when considering approaches to reducing the cost of hospital-based and other acute care.

One strategy is to better define and possibly expand the cohort of patients likely to benefit from care in an observation unit. Hospitals with significant experience using observation units treat not only common observation conditions like chest pain, asthma, or cellulitis, but also higher-risk inpatient conditions like syncope and diabetic ketoacidosis using rapid diagnostic and treatment protocols.

Identifying high-value observation care also will require developing patient outcome measures specific for observation stays. Observation-specific quality measures will allow a comparison of hospitals that use different care pathways for observation patients or treat certain populations of patients in observation units. This necessitates looking beyond resource use (costs and length of stay), which most studies on observation units have focused on, and examining a broader range of patient outcomes like time to symptomatic resolution, quality of life, or return to productivity after an acute illness.

Finally, observation care is also a good target for payment redesign. For example, incentive payments could be provided to hospitals that choose to develop observation units, employ observation units that utilize best known practices for observation care (such as protocols and clearly defined patient cohorts), or deliver particularly good acute care outcomes for patients with observation-amenable conditions. On the consumer side, value-based contracting could be used to shunt patients with acute conditions that require evaluation in an urgent care center or ED to hospitals that use observation units.

While the declines in inpatient admission and increases in treat-and-release ED patients have been well-documented over time, perhaps the biggest contribution of this study from Nuckols et al.⁶ lies in its identification of the changes in observation care, which have been increasing in all payer groups. Our opportunity now is to shape whether these shifts toward observation care deliver greater value for patients.

Acknowledgment

The authors thank Joanna Guo, BA, for her editorial and technical assistance.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

After patients have experienced an illness requiring a hospital stay, they are increasingly finding that despite having received treatment in a hospital bed, they were never actually admitted—at least not from the perspective of their insurers. Instead, these patients were kept under observation, an outpatient designation that allows a hospital to bill for observation services without formally admitting a patient.

Recent studies have recorded significant increases in hospitals’ use of observation stays among the Medicare population,^1-3 raising concerns about the financial ramifications for patients. Under observation, patients are potentially responsible for a greater share of the cost and bear the financial consequences of inappropriate observation stays. Currently, around 6% of Medicare patients hospitalized as outpatients spend more than 48 hours (or two midnights) in observation, sometimes much longer, exposing them to significant out-of-pocket costs.³ In addition, liberal use of observation can lead to increased hospital stays, for example among lower-severity emergency department (ED) patients who could have been safely discharged but were instead kept for a costly observation stay.⁴ At the same time, hospitals do not necessarily benefit from this cost shifting; in fact, hospital margin is worse for patients under Medicare observation care.⁵ Yet hospitals are obligated to be compliant with CMS observation regulations and may try to avoid the consequences (eg, audits, non-payment) for inpatient stays that are deemed inappropriate by CMS.

While the nuances of how CMS finances observation stays have made the practice controversial, the use of observation care in other payer groups that may not have the same reimbursement policies, and its impact on patients, have not been well studied. In this issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Nuckols et al.⁶ begins to address this gap by carefully exploring trends in observation stays in a multipayer data set.

The authors use data for four states (Georgia, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Tennessee) from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research) and the American Community Survey (US Census Bureau) to calculate population based rates of ED visits, observation stays, and inpatient admissions. To date, this is the first study to examine and compare the use of observation stays in an all-payer data set. Similar to prior work that examined the Medicare population, the authors find increased rates of treat-and-release ED visits and observation stays over time with a corresponding decline in inpatient admissions. As this study clearly shows, observation stays are comprising a greater fraction of the total hospital care delivered to patients with acute illnesses.

In many ways, the findings of Nuckols et al.⁶ raise more questions than they answer. For example, does the rise in observation stays represent a fundamental shift in how hospitals deliver care, an alternative to costly inpatient admissions? Are changing payer incentives driving hospitals to be more prudent in their inpatient admission practices, or are similar services simply being delivered under a new billing designation? And, most important, does this shift have any repercussions for the quality and safety of patient care?

Ultimately, the answer to these questions is, “It depends.” As the authors mention, most US hospitals admit observation patients to general medical wards, where they receive care at the admitting provider’s discretion instead of utilizing specific care pathways or observation protocols.⁷ In some of these hospitals, there may be little to no difference in how the observation patient is treated compared with a similar patient who is hospitalized as an inpatient.

However, a minority of hospitals has been more strategic in their delivery of observation care and have developed observation units. While observation units vary in design, common features include a dedicated location in the hospital with dedicated staff, reliance on clear inclusion-exclusion criteria for admission to the unit, and the use of rapid diagnostic or treatment protocols for a limited number of conditions. About half of these observation units are ED-based, reducing transitions of care between services. Protocol-driven observation units have the potential to prevent unnecessary inpatient admissions, standardize evidence-based practice, and reduce practice variation and resource use, apparently without increasing adverse events.⁸ In addition, they may also lead to better experiences of care for many patients compared with inpatient admissions.

Medicare’s own policy on observation hospital care succinctly describes ED observation units: “Observation services are commonly ordered for patients who present to the emergency department and who then require a significant period of treatment in order to make a decision concerning their admission or discharge…usually in less than 24 hours.” Due to regulatory changes and auditing pressure, observation care has expanded beyond this definition in length of stay, scope, and practice such that much of observation care now occurs on general hospital wards. Ideally, observation policy must be realigned with its original intent and investment made in ED observation units.

The shifting landscape of hospital-based care as described by Nuckols et al.⁶ highlights the need for a more strategic approach to the delivery of acute care. Unfortunately, to date, there has been a lack of attention among policymakers towards promoting a system of emergent and urgent care that is coordinated and efficient. Observation stays are one major area for which innovations in the acute care delivery system may result in meaningful improvement in patient outcomes and greater value for the healthcare system. Incentivizing a system of high-value observation care, such as promoting the use of observation units that employ evidence-based practices, should be a key priority when considering approaches to reducing the cost of hospital-based and other acute care.

One strategy is to better define and possibly expand the cohort of patients likely to benefit from care in an observation unit. Hospitals with significant experience using observation units treat not only common observation conditions like chest pain, asthma, or cellulitis, but also higher-risk inpatient conditions like syncope and diabetic ketoacidosis using rapid diagnostic and treatment protocols.

Identifying high-value observation care also will require developing patient outcome measures specific for observation stays. Observation-specific quality measures will allow a comparison of hospitals that use different care pathways for observation patients or treat certain populations of patients in observation units. This necessitates looking beyond resource use (costs and length of stay), which most studies on observation units have focused on, and examining a broader range of patient outcomes like time to symptomatic resolution, quality of life, or return to productivity after an acute illness.

Finally, observation care is also a good target for payment redesign. For example, incentive payments could be provided to hospitals that choose to develop observation units, employ observation units that utilize best known practices for observation care (such as protocols and clearly defined patient cohorts), or deliver particularly good acute care outcomes for patients with observation-amenable conditions. On the consumer side, value-based contracting could be used to shunt patients with acute conditions that require evaluation in an urgent care center or ED to hospitals that use observation units.

While the declines in inpatient admission and increases in treat-and-release ED patients have been well-documented over time, perhaps the biggest contribution of this study from Nuckols et al.⁶ lies in its identification of the changes in observation care, which have been increasing in all payer groups. Our opportunity now is to shape whether these shifts toward observation care deliver greater value for patients.

Acknowledgment

The authors thank Joanna Guo, BA, for her editorial and technical assistance.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

After patients have experienced an illness requiring a hospital stay, they are increasingly finding that despite having received treatment in a hospital bed, they were never actually admitted—at least not from the perspective of their insurers. Instead, these patients were kept under observation, an outpatient designation that allows a hospital to bill for observation services without formally admitting a patient.

Recent studies have recorded significant increases in hospitals’ use of observation stays among the Medicare population,^1-3 raising concerns about the financial ramifications for patients. Under observation, patients are potentially responsible for a greater share of the cost and bear the financial consequences of inappropriate observation stays. Currently, around 6% of Medicare patients hospitalized as outpatients spend more than 48 hours (or two midnights) in observation, sometimes much longer, exposing them to significant out-of-pocket costs.³ In addition, liberal use of observation can lead to increased hospital stays, for example among lower-severity emergency department (ED) patients who could have been safely discharged but were instead kept for a costly observation stay.⁴ At the same time, hospitals do not necessarily benefit from this cost shifting; in fact, hospital margin is worse for patients under Medicare observation care.⁵ Yet hospitals are obligated to be compliant with CMS observation regulations and may try to avoid the consequences (eg, audits, non-payment) for inpatient stays that are deemed inappropriate by CMS.

While the nuances of how CMS finances observation stays have made the practice controversial, the use of observation care in other payer groups that may not have the same reimbursement policies, and its impact on patients, have not been well studied. In this issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Nuckols et al.⁶ begins to address this gap by carefully exploring trends in observation stays in a multipayer data set.

The authors use data for four states (Georgia, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Tennessee) from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research) and the American Community Survey (US Census Bureau) to calculate population based rates of ED visits, observation stays, and inpatient admissions. To date, this is the first study to examine and compare the use of observation stays in an all-payer data set. Similar to prior work that examined the Medicare population, the authors find increased rates of treat-and-release ED visits and observation stays over time with a corresponding decline in inpatient admissions. As this study clearly shows, observation stays are comprising a greater fraction of the total hospital care delivered to patients with acute illnesses.

In many ways, the findings of Nuckols et al.⁶ raise more questions than they answer. For example, does the rise in observation stays represent a fundamental shift in how hospitals deliver care, an alternative to costly inpatient admissions? Are changing payer incentives driving hospitals to be more prudent in their inpatient admission practices, or are similar services simply being delivered under a new billing designation? And, most important, does this shift have any repercussions for the quality and safety of patient care?

Ultimately, the answer to these questions is, “It depends.” As the authors mention, most US hospitals admit observation patients to general medical wards, where they receive care at the admitting provider’s discretion instead of utilizing specific care pathways or observation protocols.⁷ In some of these hospitals, there may be little to no difference in how the observation patient is treated compared with a similar patient who is hospitalized as an inpatient.

However, a minority of hospitals has been more strategic in their delivery of observation care and have developed observation units. While observation units vary in design, common features include a dedicated location in the hospital with dedicated staff, reliance on clear inclusion-exclusion criteria for admission to the unit, and the use of rapid diagnostic or treatment protocols for a limited number of conditions. About half of these observation units are ED-based, reducing transitions of care between services. Protocol-driven observation units have the potential to prevent unnecessary inpatient admissions, standardize evidence-based practice, and reduce practice variation and resource use, apparently without increasing adverse events.⁸ In addition, they may also lead to better experiences of care for many patients compared with inpatient admissions.

Medicare’s own policy on observation hospital care succinctly describes ED observation units: “Observation services are commonly ordered for patients who present to the emergency department and who then require a significant period of treatment in order to make a decision concerning their admission or discharge…usually in less than 24 hours.” Due to regulatory changes and auditing pressure, observation care has expanded beyond this definition in length of stay, scope, and practice such that much of observation care now occurs on general hospital wards. Ideally, observation policy must be realigned with its original intent and investment made in ED observation units.

The shifting landscape of hospital-based care as described by Nuckols et al.⁶ highlights the need for a more strategic approach to the delivery of acute care. Unfortunately, to date, there has been a lack of attention among policymakers towards promoting a system of emergent and urgent care that is coordinated and efficient. Observation stays are one major area for which innovations in the acute care delivery system may result in meaningful improvement in patient outcomes and greater value for the healthcare system. Incentivizing a system of high-value observation care, such as promoting the use of observation units that employ evidence-based practices, should be a key priority when considering approaches to reducing the cost of hospital-based and other acute care.

One strategy is to better define and possibly expand the cohort of patients likely to benefit from care in an observation unit. Hospitals with significant experience using observation units treat not only common observation conditions like chest pain, asthma, or cellulitis, but also higher-risk inpatient conditions like syncope and diabetic ketoacidosis using rapid diagnostic and treatment protocols.

Identifying high-value observation care also will require developing patient outcome measures specific for observation stays. Observation-specific quality measures will allow a comparison of hospitals that use different care pathways for observation patients or treat certain populations of patients in observation units. This necessitates looking beyond resource use (costs and length of stay), which most studies on observation units have focused on, and examining a broader range of patient outcomes like time to symptomatic resolution, quality of life, or return to productivity after an acute illness.

Finally, observation care is also a good target for payment redesign. For example, incentive payments could be provided to hospitals that choose to develop observation units, employ observation units that utilize best known practices for observation care (such as protocols and clearly defined patient cohorts), or deliver particularly good acute care outcomes for patients with observation-amenable conditions. On the consumer side, value-based contracting could be used to shunt patients with acute conditions that require evaluation in an urgent care center or ED to hospitals that use observation units.

While the declines in inpatient admission and increases in treat-and-release ED patients have been well-documented over time, perhaps the biggest contribution of this study from Nuckols et al.⁶ lies in its identification of the changes in observation care, which have been increasing in all payer groups. Our opportunity now is to shape whether these shifts toward observation care deliver greater value for patients.

Acknowledgment

The authors thank Joanna Guo, BA, for her editorial and technical assistance.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

Monitor watcher personnel are frequently used to assist nurses with identifying meaningful events on telemetry monitors. Although effectiveness of monitor watchers on patient outcomes has not been demonstrated conclusively,¹ as many as 60% of United States hospitals may be using monitor watchers in some capacity.² Presumed benefits of monitor watchers include prompt recognition of changes in patients’ conditions and the potential to reduce alarm fatigue among hospital staff. Alarm fatigue is desensitization resulting from overexposure to alarm signals that are either invalid or clinically irrelevant. Alarm fatigue has resulted in missed patient events and preventable deaths.³ In this issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Palchaudhuri et al.⁴ report findings from their observational study of telemetry monitor alarms intercepted by monitor watchers as a mechanism for reducing both nurses’ exposure to alarm signals and subsequent alarm fatigue.

To our knowledge, the study by Palchaudhuri et al.⁴ is the first to report the effect of monitor watchers on nurses’ exposure to alarm signals. In this study, over a 2-month period monitor watchers intercepted 87% of alarms before they were sent to the nurse’s telephone. Monitor watchers intercepted over 90% of bradycardia and tachycardia alarms, indicating that they believed these alarms to be clinically irrelevant. Monitor watchers also intercepted about 75% of alarms for lethal arrhythmias, indicating that they believed these alarms to be invalid.

In this study, decisions about alarm validity and relevance were made through close communication between monitor watchers and nursing staff. If an alarm was sounding and the monitor watcher had already spoken with the nurse about it and established that the nurse was addressing the problem, the monitor watcher would intercept subsequent alarms for that issue or event (according to personal communication with S. Palchaudhuri). The results of the study not only indicate that monitor watchers can reduce the number of alarms to which a nurse is exposed, but also support previous findings that few alarms are valid or clinically relevant.^5-7 The results of this study also suggest that “nuisance” alarms should include not only clinically irrelevant alarms, but also relevant alarms for which the nurse is actively seeking a solution. Monitor watchers may have an important role in addressing these alarms.

The study raises important considerations regarding monitor watcher practice and alarm fatigue. If monitor watchers are to be effective in reducing nurses’ exposure to alarms, they must use good judgment to determine when to intercept an alarm, call the nurse, or both. In the absence of proper judgment, monitor watchers may inadvertently increase nurses’ fatigue through redundant calls or inappropriately suppress valid relevant alarms. In free-text responses to our national monitor watcher survey, nurses expressed frustration over redundant calls from monitor watchers for invalid and irrelevant alarms.² Research suggests that monitor watchers may not identify potentially dangerous alarms with complete accuracy. In a recent study reported in The Journal of the American Medical Society (JAMA), monitor watchers missed about 18% of patients with detectable rhythm or rate changes on telemetry in the hour before an emergency response team was activated.⁸

Several factors and conditions may affect monitor watchers’ judgment: 1) education and training, 2) location and access to contextual patient information, and 3) fatigue. First, across the US, the level of education required for monitor watcher positions ranges from a high school diploma to licensure as a registered nurse. The content and frequency of in-service training required also varies.² These differing requirements may influence monitor watchers’ ability to interpret alarms.

Second, most monitor watchers are located off the patient care unit,² which influences their access to information. Even in remote locations, monitor watchers can assess alarm validity by reviewing parameter waveforms for artifact. However, determining the relevance of an alarm to a particular patient is a more complex task requiring contextual information about the patient.⁹ Monitor watchers must work closely with clinicians at the bedside to determine the relevance of alarms, and repeated contact between monitor watchers and nurses over alarm conditions may itself increase nurses’ alarm fatigue.

Finally, fatigue may affect monitor watchers themselves and reduce their effectiveness. This issue was raised by Palchaudhuri et al. Both the number of monitors watched and the length of the monitor watcher’s shift likely influence alertness and effectiveness. In a simulation study, Segall et al.¹⁰ found that monitor watchers’ recognition of serious arrhythmias was significantly delayed when they were responsible for more than 40 patient monitors. Monitor watchers often work 12-hour shifts,² and although no research has been reported on their shift-related alertness, this is a long time to remain attentive.

Given these potential challenges, future research should specifically address adverse patient outcomes and missed clinically relevant alarms. Only two of the seven patients who arrested during the study by Palchaudhuri et al.⁴ were on telemetry, and neither arrested due to lethal arrhythmias. While this is an important indication that no alarms for lethal arrhythmias were inadvertently suppressed, it is difficult to achieve adequate statistical power to assess rare outcomes like cardiac arrests. In a future study, alarms intercepted by monitor watchers could be assessed for accuracy and relevance to patient care to determine whether important alarms were inadvertently suppressed.

In summary, the study by Palchaudhuri et al.⁴ represents a preliminary step in considering the potential utility of monitor watchers for reducing invalid and clinically irrelevant alarms as well as subsequent alarm fatigue. As the authors note, dedicated monitor watchers can screen alarms much more quickly than nurses who may be engaged in other activities when an alarm signals. The study raises interesting questions about how monitor watchers should be incorporated into workflow. Should their only responsibility be to call regarding potentially critical events, or should they be able to prevent alarms from reaching the nurse? Could monitor watchers provide guidance to reduce alarm fatigue, such as suggesting parameter changes when they see trends in irrelevant alarms? Future research is warranted to understand how monitor watchers can be used most effectively to reduce alarm fatigue, and which characteristics of monitor watchers and their practice result in the best patient outcomes.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

Monitor watcher personnel are frequently used to assist nurses with identifying meaningful events on telemetry monitors. Although effectiveness of monitor watchers on patient outcomes has not been demonstrated conclusively,¹ as many as 60% of United States hospitals may be using monitor watchers in some capacity.² Presumed benefits of monitor watchers include prompt recognition of changes in patients’ conditions and the potential to reduce alarm fatigue among hospital staff. Alarm fatigue is desensitization resulting from overexposure to alarm signals that are either invalid or clinically irrelevant. Alarm fatigue has resulted in missed patient events and preventable deaths.³ In this issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Palchaudhuri et al.⁴ report findings from their observational study of telemetry monitor alarms intercepted by monitor watchers as a mechanism for reducing both nurses’ exposure to alarm signals and subsequent alarm fatigue.

To our knowledge, the study by Palchaudhuri et al.⁴ is the first to report the effect of monitor watchers on nurses’ exposure to alarm signals. In this study, over a 2-month period monitor watchers intercepted 87% of alarms before they were sent to the nurse’s telephone. Monitor watchers intercepted over 90% of bradycardia and tachycardia alarms, indicating that they believed these alarms to be clinically irrelevant. Monitor watchers also intercepted about 75% of alarms for lethal arrhythmias, indicating that they believed these alarms to be invalid.

In this study, decisions about alarm validity and relevance were made through close communication between monitor watchers and nursing staff. If an alarm was sounding and the monitor watcher had already spoken with the nurse about it and established that the nurse was addressing the problem, the monitor watcher would intercept subsequent alarms for that issue or event (according to personal communication with S. Palchaudhuri). The results of the study not only indicate that monitor watchers can reduce the number of alarms to which a nurse is exposed, but also support previous findings that few alarms are valid or clinically relevant.^5-7 The results of this study also suggest that “nuisance” alarms should include not only clinically irrelevant alarms, but also relevant alarms for which the nurse is actively seeking a solution. Monitor watchers may have an important role in addressing these alarms.

The study raises important considerations regarding monitor watcher practice and alarm fatigue. If monitor watchers are to be effective in reducing nurses’ exposure to alarms, they must use good judgment to determine when to intercept an alarm, call the nurse, or both. In the absence of proper judgment, monitor watchers may inadvertently increase nurses’ fatigue through redundant calls or inappropriately suppress valid relevant alarms. In free-text responses to our national monitor watcher survey, nurses expressed frustration over redundant calls from monitor watchers for invalid and irrelevant alarms.² Research suggests that monitor watchers may not identify potentially dangerous alarms with complete accuracy. In a recent study reported in The Journal of the American Medical Society (JAMA), monitor watchers missed about 18% of patients with detectable rhythm or rate changes on telemetry in the hour before an emergency response team was activated.⁸

Several factors and conditions may affect monitor watchers’ judgment: 1) education and training, 2) location and access to contextual patient information, and 3) fatigue. First, across the US, the level of education required for monitor watcher positions ranges from a high school diploma to licensure as a registered nurse. The content and frequency of in-service training required also varies.² These differing requirements may influence monitor watchers’ ability to interpret alarms.

Second, most monitor watchers are located off the patient care unit,² which influences their access to information. Even in remote locations, monitor watchers can assess alarm validity by reviewing parameter waveforms for artifact. However, determining the relevance of an alarm to a particular patient is a more complex task requiring contextual information about the patient.⁹ Monitor watchers must work closely with clinicians at the bedside to determine the relevance of alarms, and repeated contact between monitor watchers and nurses over alarm conditions may itself increase nurses’ alarm fatigue.

Finally, fatigue may affect monitor watchers themselves and reduce their effectiveness. This issue was raised by Palchaudhuri et al. Both the number of monitors watched and the length of the monitor watcher’s shift likely influence alertness and effectiveness. In a simulation study, Segall et al.¹⁰ found that monitor watchers’ recognition of serious arrhythmias was significantly delayed when they were responsible for more than 40 patient monitors. Monitor watchers often work 12-hour shifts,² and although no research has been reported on their shift-related alertness, this is a long time to remain attentive.

Given these potential challenges, future research should specifically address adverse patient outcomes and missed clinically relevant alarms. Only two of the seven patients who arrested during the study by Palchaudhuri et al.⁴ were on telemetry, and neither arrested due to lethal arrhythmias. While this is an important indication that no alarms for lethal arrhythmias were inadvertently suppressed, it is difficult to achieve adequate statistical power to assess rare outcomes like cardiac arrests. In a future study, alarms intercepted by monitor watchers could be assessed for accuracy and relevance to patient care to determine whether important alarms were inadvertently suppressed.

In summary, the study by Palchaudhuri et al.⁴ represents a preliminary step in considering the potential utility of monitor watchers for reducing invalid and clinically irrelevant alarms as well as subsequent alarm fatigue. As the authors note, dedicated monitor watchers can screen alarms much more quickly than nurses who may be engaged in other activities when an alarm signals. The study raises interesting questions about how monitor watchers should be incorporated into workflow. Should their only responsibility be to call regarding potentially critical events, or should they be able to prevent alarms from reaching the nurse? Could monitor watchers provide guidance to reduce alarm fatigue, such as suggesting parameter changes when they see trends in irrelevant alarms? Future research is warranted to understand how monitor watchers can be used most effectively to reduce alarm fatigue, and which characteristics of monitor watchers and their practice result in the best patient outcomes.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

Monitor watcher personnel are frequently used to assist nurses with identifying meaningful events on telemetry monitors. Although effectiveness of monitor watchers on patient outcomes has not been demonstrated conclusively,¹ as many as 60% of United States hospitals may be using monitor watchers in some capacity.² Presumed benefits of monitor watchers include prompt recognition of changes in patients’ conditions and the potential to reduce alarm fatigue among hospital staff. Alarm fatigue is desensitization resulting from overexposure to alarm signals that are either invalid or clinically irrelevant. Alarm fatigue has resulted in missed patient events and preventable deaths.³ In this issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, Palchaudhuri et al.⁴ report findings from their observational study of telemetry monitor alarms intercepted by monitor watchers as a mechanism for reducing both nurses’ exposure to alarm signals and subsequent alarm fatigue.

To our knowledge, the study by Palchaudhuri et al.⁴ is the first to report the effect of monitor watchers on nurses’ exposure to alarm signals. In this study, over a 2-month period monitor watchers intercepted 87% of alarms before they were sent to the nurse’s telephone. Monitor watchers intercepted over 90% of bradycardia and tachycardia alarms, indicating that they believed these alarms to be clinically irrelevant. Monitor watchers also intercepted about 75% of alarms for lethal arrhythmias, indicating that they believed these alarms to be invalid.

In this study, decisions about alarm validity and relevance were made through close communication between monitor watchers and nursing staff. If an alarm was sounding and the monitor watcher had already spoken with the nurse about it and established that the nurse was addressing the problem, the monitor watcher would intercept subsequent alarms for that issue or event (according to personal communication with S. Palchaudhuri). The results of the study not only indicate that monitor watchers can reduce the number of alarms to which a nurse is exposed, but also support previous findings that few alarms are valid or clinically relevant.^5-7 The results of this study also suggest that “nuisance” alarms should include not only clinically irrelevant alarms, but also relevant alarms for which the nurse is actively seeking a solution. Monitor watchers may have an important role in addressing these alarms.

The study raises important considerations regarding monitor watcher practice and alarm fatigue. If monitor watchers are to be effective in reducing nurses’ exposure to alarms, they must use good judgment to determine when to intercept an alarm, call the nurse, or both. In the absence of proper judgment, monitor watchers may inadvertently increase nurses’ fatigue through redundant calls or inappropriately suppress valid relevant alarms. In free-text responses to our national monitor watcher survey, nurses expressed frustration over redundant calls from monitor watchers for invalid and irrelevant alarms.² Research suggests that monitor watchers may not identify potentially dangerous alarms with complete accuracy. In a recent study reported in The Journal of the American Medical Society (JAMA), monitor watchers missed about 18% of patients with detectable rhythm or rate changes on telemetry in the hour before an emergency response team was activated.⁸

Several factors and conditions may affect monitor watchers’ judgment: 1) education and training, 2) location and access to contextual patient information, and 3) fatigue. First, across the US, the level of education required for monitor watcher positions ranges from a high school diploma to licensure as a registered nurse. The content and frequency of in-service training required also varies.² These differing requirements may influence monitor watchers’ ability to interpret alarms.

Second, most monitor watchers are located off the patient care unit,² which influences their access to information. Even in remote locations, monitor watchers can assess alarm validity by reviewing parameter waveforms for artifact. However, determining the relevance of an alarm to a particular patient is a more complex task requiring contextual information about the patient.⁹ Monitor watchers must work closely with clinicians at the bedside to determine the relevance of alarms, and repeated contact between monitor watchers and nurses over alarm conditions may itself increase nurses’ alarm fatigue.

Finally, fatigue may affect monitor watchers themselves and reduce their effectiveness. This issue was raised by Palchaudhuri et al. Both the number of monitors watched and the length of the monitor watcher’s shift likely influence alertness and effectiveness. In a simulation study, Segall et al.¹⁰ found that monitor watchers’ recognition of serious arrhythmias was significantly delayed when they were responsible for more than 40 patient monitors. Monitor watchers often work 12-hour shifts,² and although no research has been reported on their shift-related alertness, this is a long time to remain attentive.

Given these potential challenges, future research should specifically address adverse patient outcomes and missed clinically relevant alarms. Only two of the seven patients who arrested during the study by Palchaudhuri et al.⁴ were on telemetry, and neither arrested due to lethal arrhythmias. While this is an important indication that no alarms for lethal arrhythmias were inadvertently suppressed, it is difficult to achieve adequate statistical power to assess rare outcomes like cardiac arrests. In a future study, alarms intercepted by monitor watchers could be assessed for accuracy and relevance to patient care to determine whether important alarms were inadvertently suppressed.

In summary, the study by Palchaudhuri et al.⁴ represents a preliminary step in considering the potential utility of monitor watchers for reducing invalid and clinically irrelevant alarms as well as subsequent alarm fatigue. As the authors note, dedicated monitor watchers can screen alarms much more quickly than nurses who may be engaged in other activities when an alarm signals. The study raises interesting questions about how monitor watchers should be incorporated into workflow. Should their only responsibility be to call regarding potentially critical events, or should they be able to prevent alarms from reaching the nurse? Could monitor watchers provide guidance to reduce alarm fatigue, such as suggesting parameter changes when they see trends in irrelevant alarms? Future research is warranted to understand how monitor watchers can be used most effectively to reduce alarm fatigue, and which characteristics of monitor watchers and their practice result in the best patient outcomes.

Disclosure

Nothing to report.

Starting probiotics within 2 days of the first antibiotic dose could cut the risk of Clostridium difficile infection among hospitalized adults by more than 50%, according to the results of a systemic review and metaregression analysis.

The protective effect waned when patients delayed starting probiotics, reported Nicole T. Shen, MD, of Cornell University, New York, and her associates. The study appears in Gastroenterology (doi: 10.1053/j.gastro.2017.02.003). “Given the magnitude of benefit and the low cost of probiotics, the decision is likely to be highly cost effective,” they added.

Systematic reviews support the use of probiotics for preventing Clostridium difficile infection (CDI), but guidelines do not reflect these findings. To help guide clinical practice, the reviewers searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, the International Journal of Probiotics and Prebiotics, and the Cochrane Library databases for randomized controlled trials of probiotics and CDI among hospitalized adults taking antibiotics. This search yielded 19 published studies of 6,261 patients. Two reviewers separately extracted data from these studies and examined quality of evidence and risk of bias.

SOURCE: AMERICAN GASTROENTEROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

A total of 54 patients in the probiotic cohort (1.6%) developed CDI, compared with 115 controls (3.9%), a statistically significant difference (P less than .001). In ­regression analysis, the probiotic group was about 58% less likely to develop CDI than controls (hazard ratio, 0.42; 95% confidence interval, 0.30-0.57; P less than .001). Importantly, probiotics were significantly effective against CDI only when started within 2 days of antibiotic initiation (relative risk, 0.32; 95% CI, 0.22-0.48), not when started within 3-7 days (RR, 0.70, 95% CI, 0.40-1.23). The difference between these estimated risk ratios was statistically significant (P = .02).

In 18 of the 19 studies, patients received probiotics within 3 days of starting antibiotics, while patients in the remaining study could start probiotics any time within 7 days of antibiotic initiation. “Not only was [this] study unusual with respect to probiotic timing, it was also much larger than all other studies, and its results were statistically insignificant,” the reviewers wrote. Metaregression analyses of all studies and of all but the outlier study linked delaying probiotics with a decrease in efficacy against CDI, with P values of .04 and .09, respectively. Those findings “suggest that the decrement in efficacy with delay in starting probiotics is not sensitive to inclusion of a single large ‘outlier’ study,” the reviewers emphasized. “In fact, inclusion only dampens the magnitude of the decrement in efficacy, although it is still clinically important and statistically significant.”

The trials included 12 probiotic formulas containing Lactobacillus, Saccharomyces, Bifidobacterium, and Streptococcus, either alone or in combination. Probiotics were not associated with adverse effects in the trials. Quality of evidence was generally high, but seven trials had missing data on the primary outcome. Furthermore, two studies lacked a placebo group, and lead authors of two studies disclosed ties to the probiotic manufacturers that provided funding.

One reviewer received fellowship support from the Louis and Rachel Rudin Foundation. None had conflicts of interest.

Starting probiotics within 2 days of the first antibiotic dose could cut the risk of Clostridium difficile infection among hospitalized adults by more than 50%, according to the results of a systemic review and metaregression analysis.

The protective effect waned when patients delayed starting probiotics, reported Nicole T. Shen, MD, of Cornell University, New York, and her associates. The study appears in Gastroenterology (doi: 10.1053/j.gastro.2017.02.003). “Given the magnitude of benefit and the low cost of probiotics, the decision is likely to be highly cost effective,” they added.

Systematic reviews support the use of probiotics for preventing Clostridium difficile infection (CDI), but guidelines do not reflect these findings. To help guide clinical practice, the reviewers searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, the International Journal of Probiotics and Prebiotics, and the Cochrane Library databases for randomized controlled trials of probiotics and CDI among hospitalized adults taking antibiotics. This search yielded 19 published studies of 6,261 patients. Two reviewers separately extracted data from these studies and examined quality of evidence and risk of bias.

SOURCE: AMERICAN GASTROENTEROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

A total of 54 patients in the probiotic cohort (1.6%) developed CDI, compared with 115 controls (3.9%), a statistically significant difference (P less than .001). In ­regression analysis, the probiotic group was about 58% less likely to develop CDI than controls (hazard ratio, 0.42; 95% confidence interval, 0.30-0.57; P less than .001). Importantly, probiotics were significantly effective against CDI only when started within 2 days of antibiotic initiation (relative risk, 0.32; 95% CI, 0.22-0.48), not when started within 3-7 days (RR, 0.70, 95% CI, 0.40-1.23). The difference between these estimated risk ratios was statistically significant (P = .02).

In 18 of the 19 studies, patients received probiotics within 3 days of starting antibiotics, while patients in the remaining study could start probiotics any time within 7 days of antibiotic initiation. “Not only was [this] study unusual with respect to probiotic timing, it was also much larger than all other studies, and its results were statistically insignificant,” the reviewers wrote. Metaregression analyses of all studies and of all but the outlier study linked delaying probiotics with a decrease in efficacy against CDI, with P values of .04 and .09, respectively. Those findings “suggest that the decrement in efficacy with delay in starting probiotics is not sensitive to inclusion of a single large ‘outlier’ study,” the reviewers emphasized. “In fact, inclusion only dampens the magnitude of the decrement in efficacy, although it is still clinically important and statistically significant.”

The trials included 12 probiotic formulas containing Lactobacillus, Saccharomyces, Bifidobacterium, and Streptococcus, either alone or in combination. Probiotics were not associated with adverse effects in the trials. Quality of evidence was generally high, but seven trials had missing data on the primary outcome. Furthermore, two studies lacked a placebo group, and lead authors of two studies disclosed ties to the probiotic manufacturers that provided funding.

One reviewer received fellowship support from the Louis and Rachel Rudin Foundation. None had conflicts of interest.

Starting probiotics within 2 days of the first antibiotic dose could cut the risk of Clostridium difficile infection among hospitalized adults by more than 50%, according to the results of a systemic review and metaregression analysis.

The protective effect waned when patients delayed starting probiotics, reported Nicole T. Shen, MD, of Cornell University, New York, and her associates. The study appears in Gastroenterology (doi: 10.1053/j.gastro.2017.02.003). “Given the magnitude of benefit and the low cost of probiotics, the decision is likely to be highly cost effective,” they added.

Systematic reviews support the use of probiotics for preventing Clostridium difficile infection (CDI), but guidelines do not reflect these findings. To help guide clinical practice, the reviewers searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, the International Journal of Probiotics and Prebiotics, and the Cochrane Library databases for randomized controlled trials of probiotics and CDI among hospitalized adults taking antibiotics. This search yielded 19 published studies of 6,261 patients. Two reviewers separately extracted data from these studies and examined quality of evidence and risk of bias.

SOURCE: AMERICAN GASTROENTEROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

A total of 54 patients in the probiotic cohort (1.6%) developed CDI, compared with 115 controls (3.9%), a statistically significant difference (P less than .001). In ­regression analysis, the probiotic group was about 58% less likely to develop CDI than controls (hazard ratio, 0.42; 95% confidence interval, 0.30-0.57; P less than .001). Importantly, probiotics were significantly effective against CDI only when started within 2 days of antibiotic initiation (relative risk, 0.32; 95% CI, 0.22-0.48), not when started within 3-7 days (RR, 0.70, 95% CI, 0.40-1.23). The difference between these estimated risk ratios was statistically significant (P = .02).

In 18 of the 19 studies, patients received probiotics within 3 days of starting antibiotics, while patients in the remaining study could start probiotics any time within 7 days of antibiotic initiation. “Not only was [this] study unusual with respect to probiotic timing, it was also much larger than all other studies, and its results were statistically insignificant,” the reviewers wrote. Metaregression analyses of all studies and of all but the outlier study linked delaying probiotics with a decrease in efficacy against CDI, with P values of .04 and .09, respectively. Those findings “suggest that the decrement in efficacy with delay in starting probiotics is not sensitive to inclusion of a single large ‘outlier’ study,” the reviewers emphasized. “In fact, inclusion only dampens the magnitude of the decrement in efficacy, although it is still clinically important and statistically significant.”

The trials included 12 probiotic formulas containing Lactobacillus, Saccharomyces, Bifidobacterium, and Streptococcus, either alone or in combination. Probiotics were not associated with adverse effects in the trials. Quality of evidence was generally high, but seven trials had missing data on the primary outcome. Furthermore, two studies lacked a placebo group, and lead authors of two studies disclosed ties to the probiotic manufacturers that provided funding.

One reviewer received fellowship support from the Louis and Rachel Rudin Foundation. None had conflicts of interest.

Living more than 150 miles from a liver transplant center was associated with a higher risk of mortality among patients with chronic liver failure, regardless of etiology, transplantation status, or whether patients had decompensated cirrhosis or hepatocellular carcinoma, according to a first-in-kind, population-based study reported in the June issue of Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology (doi: 10.1016/j.cgh.2017.02.023).

The findings underscore the need for accessible, specialized liver care irrespective of whether patients with chronic liver failure (CLF) are destined for transplantation, David S. Goldberg, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, wrote with his associates. The associations “do not provide cause and effect,” but underscore the need to consider “the broader impact of transplant-related policies that could decrease transplant volumes and threaten closures of smaller liver transplant centers that serve geographically isolated populations in the Southeast and Midwest,” they added.

Living more than 150 miles from a liver transplant center was associated with a higher risk of mortality among patients with chronic liver failure, regardless of etiology, transplantation status, or whether patients had decompensated cirrhosis or hepatocellular carcinoma, according to a first-in-kind, population-based study reported in the June issue of Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology (doi: 10.1016/j.cgh.2017.02.023).

The findings underscore the need for accessible, specialized liver care irrespective of whether patients with chronic liver failure (CLF) are destined for transplantation, David S. Goldberg, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, wrote with his associates. The associations “do not provide cause and effect,” but underscore the need to consider “the broader impact of transplant-related policies that could decrease transplant volumes and threaten closures of smaller liver transplant centers that serve geographically isolated populations in the Southeast and Midwest,” they added.

Living more than 150 miles from a liver transplant center was associated with a higher risk of mortality among patients with chronic liver failure, regardless of etiology, transplantation status, or whether patients had decompensated cirrhosis or hepatocellular carcinoma, according to a first-in-kind, population-based study reported in the June issue of Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology (doi: 10.1016/j.cgh.2017.02.023).

The findings underscore the need for accessible, specialized liver care irrespective of whether patients with chronic liver failure (CLF) are destined for transplantation, David S. Goldberg, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, wrote with his associates. The associations “do not provide cause and effect,” but underscore the need to consider “the broader impact of transplant-related policies that could decrease transplant volumes and threaten closures of smaller liver transplant centers that serve geographically isolated populations in the Southeast and Midwest,” they added.

Oral cancer has a low 5-year survival rate compared with other major types of cancer, and the rate hasn’t improved much in recent years, say researchers from China Medical University, Asia University, Taichung Veterans General Hospital, and National Yang-Ming University; all in Taichung, Taiwan. That may be due in part to delay in treatment, they say. Their analysis of data of 21,263 patients with oral cavity squamous cell carcinoma (OCSCC) bears out their theory.

Related: Predicting Tongue Cancer Recurrence

About 40% of the patients presented with stage IV disease. More than one-third had tongue cancer. The average time from diagnosis to treatment was 24 days. Most patients (86%) were treated within 30 days of diagnosis; 12% were treated between 31 and 120 days after diagnosis, and 2.7% received treatment 120 days after diagnosis. Surgery was usually the first treatment.

The time interval from diagnosis to treatment (the phrase the researchers prefer to “treatment delay” or “wait time”) was an independent prognostic factor in OCSCC patients. The average interval was 24 days. Those treated within 30 days tended to have a higher survival rate. Treatment after 120 days from diagnosis increased the risk of death by 1.32-fold.

The average follow-up period was 44 months. When the researchers stratified patients according to the time between diagnosis and treatment, they found patients aged ≥ 65 years or who had advanced cancer were more likely to be treated later. Patients treated initially with radiotherapy or chemotherapy were more likely to have a longer mean time interval when compared with those who were treated first with surgery.

Related: Shorter Length of Stay May Not Mean Higher Readmission Rates

The researchers also found that patients treated in private hospitals had a shorter time interval compared with those treated in public hospitals (although the latter were more likely to survive). Patients who received treatment in hospitals with a low- to medium-service volume had a longer interval compared with those treated in hospitals with a high-service volume. Other predictors of longer survival included being female, younger, primary tumor site at the tongue, and earlier stage disease.

The researchers cite a study that found the median duration of clinical upstaging from early to late stage was 11.3 months, whereas the average period from advanced tumor to untreatable tumor was 3.8 months. That might explain why they found that the longer delay to treatment increased the risk of death, they suggest. The researchers also point to reasons such as pending second opinions, shortages of therapeutic instruments and manpower, and lack of public awareness.

Related: IBD and the Risk of Oral Cancer

All told however, the researchers conclude, the reasons for the increased time interval from diagnosis to treatment of OCSCC patients remain “multifaceted, integrated, and poorly understood.”

Source:
Tsai WC, Kung PT, Wang YH, Huang KH, Liu SA. PLoS One. 2017;12(4):e0175148.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0175148.

Oral cancer has a low 5-year survival rate compared with other major types of cancer, and the rate hasn’t improved much in recent years, say researchers from China Medical University, Asia University, Taichung Veterans General Hospital, and National Yang-Ming University; all in Taichung, Taiwan. That may be due in part to delay in treatment, they say. Their analysis of data of 21,263 patients with oral cavity squamous cell carcinoma (OCSCC) bears out their theory.

Related: Predicting Tongue Cancer Recurrence

About 40% of the patients presented with stage IV disease. More than one-third had tongue cancer. The average time from diagnosis to treatment was 24 days. Most patients (86%) were treated within 30 days of diagnosis; 12% were treated between 31 and 120 days after diagnosis, and 2.7% received treatment 120 days after diagnosis. Surgery was usually the first treatment.

The time interval from diagnosis to treatment (the phrase the researchers prefer to “treatment delay” or “wait time”) was an independent prognostic factor in OCSCC patients. The average interval was 24 days. Those treated within 30 days tended to have a higher survival rate. Treatment after 120 days from diagnosis increased the risk of death by 1.32-fold.

The average follow-up period was 44 months. When the researchers stratified patients according to the time between diagnosis and treatment, they found patients aged ≥ 65 years or who had advanced cancer were more likely to be treated later. Patients treated initially with radiotherapy or chemotherapy were more likely to have a longer mean time interval when compared with those who were treated first with surgery.

Related: Shorter Length of Stay May Not Mean Higher Readmission Rates

The researchers also found that patients treated in private hospitals had a shorter time interval compared with those treated in public hospitals (although the latter were more likely to survive). Patients who received treatment in hospitals with a low- to medium-service volume had a longer interval compared with those treated in hospitals with a high-service volume. Other predictors of longer survival included being female, younger, primary tumor site at the tongue, and earlier stage disease.

The researchers cite a study that found the median duration of clinical upstaging from early to late stage was 11.3 months, whereas the average period from advanced tumor to untreatable tumor was 3.8 months. That might explain why they found that the longer delay to treatment increased the risk of death, they suggest. The researchers also point to reasons such as pending second opinions, shortages of therapeutic instruments and manpower, and lack of public awareness.

Related: IBD and the Risk of Oral Cancer

All told however, the researchers conclude, the reasons for the increased time interval from diagnosis to treatment of OCSCC patients remain “multifaceted, integrated, and poorly understood.”

Source:
Tsai WC, Kung PT, Wang YH, Huang KH, Liu SA. PLoS One. 2017;12(4):e0175148.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0175148.

Oral cancer has a low 5-year survival rate compared with other major types of cancer, and the rate hasn’t improved much in recent years, say researchers from China Medical University, Asia University, Taichung Veterans General Hospital, and National Yang-Ming University; all in Taichung, Taiwan. That may be due in part to delay in treatment, they say. Their analysis of data of 21,263 patients with oral cavity squamous cell carcinoma (OCSCC) bears out their theory.

Related: Predicting Tongue Cancer Recurrence

About 40% of the patients presented with stage IV disease. More than one-third had tongue cancer. The average time from diagnosis to treatment was 24 days. Most patients (86%) were treated within 30 days of diagnosis; 12% were treated between 31 and 120 days after diagnosis, and 2.7% received treatment 120 days after diagnosis. Surgery was usually the first treatment.

The time interval from diagnosis to treatment (the phrase the researchers prefer to “treatment delay” or “wait time”) was an independent prognostic factor in OCSCC patients. The average interval was 24 days. Those treated within 30 days tended to have a higher survival rate. Treatment after 120 days from diagnosis increased the risk of death by 1.32-fold.

The average follow-up period was 44 months. When the researchers stratified patients according to the time between diagnosis and treatment, they found patients aged ≥ 65 years or who had advanced cancer were more likely to be treated later. Patients treated initially with radiotherapy or chemotherapy were more likely to have a longer mean time interval when compared with those who were treated first with surgery.

Related: Shorter Length of Stay May Not Mean Higher Readmission Rates

The researchers also found that patients treated in private hospitals had a shorter time interval compared with those treated in public hospitals (although the latter were more likely to survive). Patients who received treatment in hospitals with a low- to medium-service volume had a longer interval compared with those treated in hospitals with a high-service volume. Other predictors of longer survival included being female, younger, primary tumor site at the tongue, and earlier stage disease.

The researchers cite a study that found the median duration of clinical upstaging from early to late stage was 11.3 months, whereas the average period from advanced tumor to untreatable tumor was 3.8 months. That might explain why they found that the longer delay to treatment increased the risk of death, they suggest. The researchers also point to reasons such as pending second opinions, shortages of therapeutic instruments and manpower, and lack of public awareness.

Related: IBD and the Risk of Oral Cancer

All told however, the researchers conclude, the reasons for the increased time interval from diagnosis to treatment of OCSCC patients remain “multifaceted, integrated, and poorly understood.”

Source:
Tsai WC, Kung PT, Wang YH, Huang KH, Liu SA. PLoS One. 2017;12(4):e0175148.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0175148.

Six years ago, a lesion appeared on this now 39-year-old woman’s forehead. It grew steadily to its current size, impinging on her brow line. Although it has been asymptomatic, the patient is concerned about malignancy, since she has a significant personal and family history of skin cancer. She has had several lesions removed from her face and back over the years.

EXAMINATION
There is a 2.2-cm, roughly round, white, cicatricial, concave lesion on the patient’s lower right forehead, extending into the brow line. Around the periphery are several 2- to 5-mm eroded papules. There are no palpable nodes on the head or neck.

Several scars are seen elsewhere on the patient’s face and back, consistent with her history. Her type II/VI skin is quite fair and sun-damaged.

A 6-mm deep punch biopsy of the lesion is obtained.

What is the diagnosis?

Of the different types of BCC, the most common are nodular. These present as pearly (ie, translucent) papules or nodules, with or without focal erosion or frank ulceration; they often have prominent telangiectasias coursing over their surfaces. BCCs can also appear as rashes (superficial BCC) that may not attract attention.

This patient’s lesion is one of the least common variations: It combines features of a morpheaform (scarlike) BCC with focal noduloulcerative papular lesions studding its periphery. The concavity of the scarlike portion, along with its prolonged presence, predicted deep involvement of adjacent tissue—confirmed by the biopsy results.

At a minimum, this patient will need Mohs micrographic surgical removal, with closure by skin graft or secondary intention. Given the deep perineural involvement, surgery alone may not clear the cancer; radiation therapy may be necessary.

TAKE-HOME LEARNING POINTS

• Morpheaform basal cell carcinoma (BCC), also known as cicatricial BCC, can present as a white, scarlike patch, often with an atrophic surface.
• This type of BCC is more aggressive than most, often requiring Mohs surgery.
• There are at least three other types of BCC, most of which involve nonhealing ulcerative papules or nodules.
• This patient’s history of sun-caused skin cancers makes recurrence likely.

Six years ago, a lesion appeared on this now 39-year-old woman’s forehead. It grew steadily to its current size, impinging on her brow line. Although it has been asymptomatic, the patient is concerned about malignancy, since she has a significant personal and family history of skin cancer. She has had several lesions removed from her face and back over the years.

EXAMINATION
There is a 2.2-cm, roughly round, white, cicatricial, concave lesion on the patient’s lower right forehead, extending into the brow line. Around the periphery are several 2- to 5-mm eroded papules. There are no palpable nodes on the head or neck.

Several scars are seen elsewhere on the patient’s face and back, consistent with her history. Her type II/VI skin is quite fair and sun-damaged.

A 6-mm deep punch biopsy of the lesion is obtained.

What is the diagnosis?

Of the different types of BCC, the most common are nodular. These present as pearly (ie, translucent) papules or nodules, with or without focal erosion or frank ulceration; they often have prominent telangiectasias coursing over their surfaces. BCCs can also appear as rashes (superficial BCC) that may not attract attention.

This patient’s lesion is one of the least common variations: It combines features of a morpheaform (scarlike) BCC with focal noduloulcerative papular lesions studding its periphery. The concavity of the scarlike portion, along with its prolonged presence, predicted deep involvement of adjacent tissue—confirmed by the biopsy results.

At a minimum, this patient will need Mohs micrographic surgical removal, with closure by skin graft or secondary intention. Given the deep perineural involvement, surgery alone may not clear the cancer; radiation therapy may be necessary.

TAKE-HOME LEARNING POINTS

• Morpheaform basal cell carcinoma (BCC), also known as cicatricial BCC, can present as a white, scarlike patch, often with an atrophic surface.
• This type of BCC is more aggressive than most, often requiring Mohs surgery.
• There are at least three other types of BCC, most of which involve nonhealing ulcerative papules or nodules.
• This patient’s history of sun-caused skin cancers makes recurrence likely.

Six years ago, a lesion appeared on this now 39-year-old woman’s forehead. It grew steadily to its current size, impinging on her brow line. Although it has been asymptomatic, the patient is concerned about malignancy, since she has a significant personal and family history of skin cancer. She has had several lesions removed from her face and back over the years.

EXAMINATION
There is a 2.2-cm, roughly round, white, cicatricial, concave lesion on the patient’s lower right forehead, extending into the brow line. Around the periphery are several 2- to 5-mm eroded papules. There are no palpable nodes on the head or neck.

Several scars are seen elsewhere on the patient’s face and back, consistent with her history. Her type II/VI skin is quite fair and sun-damaged.

A 6-mm deep punch biopsy of the lesion is obtained.

What is the diagnosis?

Of the different types of BCC, the most common are nodular. These present as pearly (ie, translucent) papules or nodules, with or without focal erosion or frank ulceration; they often have prominent telangiectasias coursing over their surfaces. BCCs can also appear as rashes (superficial BCC) that may not attract attention.

This patient’s lesion is one of the least common variations: It combines features of a morpheaform (scarlike) BCC with focal noduloulcerative papular lesions studding its periphery. The concavity of the scarlike portion, along with its prolonged presence, predicted deep involvement of adjacent tissue—confirmed by the biopsy results.

At a minimum, this patient will need Mohs micrographic surgical removal, with closure by skin graft or secondary intention. Given the deep perineural involvement, surgery alone may not clear the cancer; radiation therapy may be necessary.

TAKE-HOME LEARNING POINTS

• Morpheaform basal cell carcinoma (BCC), also known as cicatricial BCC, can present as a white, scarlike patch, often with an atrophic surface.
• This type of BCC is more aggressive than most, often requiring Mohs surgery.
• There are at least three other types of BCC, most of which involve nonhealing ulcerative papules or nodules.
• This patient’s history of sun-caused skin cancers makes recurrence likely.