Journal of general internal medicine
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Health care systems are increasingly partnering with community-based organizations to address social determinants of health (SDH). We established a program that educates and connects patients with SDH needs at a primary care clinic to community services and facilitated referrals. ⋯ Our findings suggest that screening clinic patients for SDH, and educating and connecting them to community services during post-hospital care may be associated with reductions in hospital readmissions.
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Patients, families, and clinicians increasingly communicate through patient portals. Due to potential for multiple authors, clinicians need to know who is communicating with them. OurNotes is a portal-based pre-visit agenda setting questionnaire. This study adapted OurNotes to include a self-identification question to help clinicians interpret information authored by nonpatients. ⋯ A self-identification question can identify nonpatient authors of OurNotes. Future steps include evaluating whether transparency improves care quality, especially when care partners are involved.
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Feedback on the diagnostic process has been proposed as a method of improving clinical reasoning and reducing diagnostic errors. Barriers to the delivery and receipt of feedback include time constraints and negative reactions. Given the shift toward asynchronous, digital communication, it is possible that electronic feedback ("e-feedback") could overcome these barriers. ⋯ E-feedback was well received by hospitalists. Their perspectives offer useful insights for enhancing electronic feedback interventions.
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Use of the Patient Portal to Discuss Medications Among People with Dementia and Their Care Partners.
People with dementia (PWD) often use potentially inappropriate medications (PIM), exposing them to harm. Patient portals are a promising platform for delivering deprescribing educational interventions to reduce PIM use, yet little is known about how PWD and their care partners use patient portals to communicate with clinicians about medications. ⋯ PWD and their care partners frequently raise medication concerns in the portal, suggesting it is a promising platform for delivering deprescribing interventions for this population. Future research should identify characteristics of portal-based interventions that would best support deprescribing for PWD and develop pragmatic workflows.
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Creating clinical vignettes requires considerable effort. Recent developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI) for natural language processing have been remarkable and may allow for the easy and immediate creation of diverse clinical vignettes. ⋯ Overall, 97% of the clinical vignettes proved practically useful, based on confirmation and revision by Japanese medical physicians. Given the significant effort required by physicians to create vignettes without AI, using GPT is expected to greatly optimize this process.