The Division of Hospital Medicine at NYU Langone is home to a vibrant research program that complements our clinical and education missions. The goals of our studies are to improve the care and outcomes for our patients, deepen our understanding of hospital medicine, and advance the education of our trainees.

Research in the division is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), other government agencies, philanthropy, and foundations including the American Medical Association.

Our faculty have published in leading hospital medicine and related journals, including the Journal of Hospital Medicine, BMJ, American Journal of Medical Quality, JAMA Internal Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and Academic Medicine.

Hospitalization Trends and Outcomes

Researchers in the Division of Hospital Medicine are at the forefront of describing the burden of hospitalizations, morbidity, and mortality related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospitalists in our division have published one of the first studies of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and their outcomes (Petrilli CM et al. 2020. BMJ) as well as studies that help us understand trends in mortality related to COVID-19, the relationship of COVID-19 to comorbid conditions (Blecker S et al. 2021. JAMA Intern Med), and racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 illness.

Other research projects in our division have focused on hospital readmissions and outcomes. Our faculty are working to understand the process of transitioning patients from the hospital to the home or from the hospital to skilled nursing facilities. Through this work, we aim to develop best practices for transitions in care.

Quality Improvement

Our hospital medicine team leads numerous efforts to develop, implement, and evaluate quality improvement projects. Some recent specific areas of focus include medicine reconciliation, documentation, discharge processes, advance care planning, and treating and preventing hospital-acquired conditions such as central line bloodstream infections (CLABSI) and skin ulcers. A focus of our research is demonstrating that various projects result in improvements in process measures as well as clinical outcomes such as length of stay, readmission, and patient satisfaction.

Value-Based Care

Another research focus area in our division is the delivery of high-value hospital care at low costs and introducing the concept of value-based care to hospital medicine (Landon SN et al. 2021. Int J Qual Health Care; Horwitz LI et al. 2015. J Hosp Med). From a combined operational and research perspective, we have spearheaded a hospital-wide management program that reduces patient length of stay and costs without compromising quality of care (Chatfield SE et al. 2019. BMJ Qual Saf).

Clinical Informatics

Hospitalists leverage informatics to improve the quality of healthcare delivery, utilizing electronic health record data and tools to improve hospital throughput (Austrian JS et al. 2020. Appl Clin Inform), clinical decision making (Iturrate E et al. 2016. Am J Med), and documentation. We collaborate with the Predictive Analytics Unit in the Center for Healthcare Innovation and Delivery Science to deploy machine learning models to guide care. One example is a prediction model that identifies key indicators of early decompensation of hospitalized patients, which we then used to develop a similar model to determine the clinical deterioration of patients with COVID-19 (Harish K et al. 2021. BMJ Health Care Inform).

Medical Education

Hospitalists in our division seek to improve patient care through innovations in medical education across the training continuum, combining techniques from informatics, health services, quality improvement, and artificial intelligence. Our faculty conduct grant-funded research on automating assessments of clinical reasoning, mapping the educational experience of trainees, and measuring long-term patient outcomes among our graduates. This work is translational in nature—bridging the classroom and laboratory to the bedside and back again—and drives improvements in NYU Langone training programs.