Steve M. Grant is a hospitalist.

He would never be ready. This was his son.

Physician
June 19, 2021

It was the blanket that killed me.  Made for a child.  Cushy, colorful, and crisscrossed with cartoon quarterbacks, clean-up hitters, and cheers like “Rah” and “Go Team.”  What father doesn’t want their son to be the high school hero?

Under the blanket was no toddler.  He was 31, emaciated, and wheezing. His contracted limbs poked out like thorns.  He was dying.

I can’t remember what horrific disorder the genetic lottery chose for …

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He would never be ready. This was his son.

After COVID-19, can we really stomach the minutiae that comes with the next Joint Commission review?

Conditions
April 28, 2020

I’ve always been fascinated with dystopian novels and zombie movies.  When the apocalypse comes, we stop sweating the small stuff.  Important tasks like sculpting our abs or finding the perfect area rug suddenly take a back seat to the new primary directive: survival. Nothing else matters.

Healthcare workers have taken a similar survival first approach to COVID.  We’ve put aside our tiny tragedies and banded together to save our communities.  It’s …

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After COVID-19, can we really stomach the minutiae that comes with the next Joint Commission review?

The hospital census calm before the COVID-19 storm

Conditions
March 22, 2020

I’m a proud member of our hospital’s Jewish All-Star team, which means I work every Christmas. One great thing about working Christmas is the hospital is never full. No one wants to be hospitalized on Christmas. If patients can go home, they do, sometimes even against medical advice. On top of that, there are no elective surgeries, chemotherapy admissions, or surprise calls from clinic. All is calm, if not bright.
Of …

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The hospital census calm before the COVID-19 storm

It’s time to view hospitalization as a procedure

Physician
February 25, 2019

I previously suggested that transitioning from the traditional inpatient care model to the hospitalist model inadvertently motivated providers to hospitalize more patients, specifically borderline sick patients.  Our example was a 74-year-old woman with pneumonia whose path to admission met less resistance with a hospitalist at the helm. The question I posed at the end was this: model aside, should we admit that patient or not?  What’s best …

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It’s time to view hospitalization as a procedure

Wonder why your hospital is full?

Physician
February 11, 2019

Why is your hospital always full? Actually, it’s more than full.  You have twenty boarders in the ED. You turned your postop recovery unit into an overnight surge center.  Every day administrators beg you to please, please discharge patients, if possible before 11 a.m.  You’ve hired an army of case managers, dissected the discharge process, and held countless capacity management meetings, but you’re still bursting at the seams.

It wasn’t always …

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Wonder why your hospital is full?