A study that examines Project BOOST’s effectiveness at decreasing rehospitalization rates was the top-cited article from the Journal of Hospital Medicine (JHM) in 2014. Titled “Project BOOST: Effectiveness of a Multihospital Effort to Reduce Rehospitalization,” the study has been cited 33 times since its publication in July 2013. The article concludes that hospitals participating in SHM’s Project BOOST (Better Outcomes for Older adults through Safe Transitions) experienced lower readmission rates.

“Project BOOST showed the effectiveness of physician-mentored implementation at reducing rehospitalization rates by improving the quality of patient care,” the study’s senior author, Mark V. Williams, MD, MHM, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, writes in an email to The Hospitalist eWire.

While researching the article, Dr. Williams says he knew it would be especially interesting to hospitalists. “I know hospitalists want to do the best job possible and not have patients be forced to return to the hospital because of problems with the hospital discharge process,” he writes. “Also, since hospitalists led this research as a nationwide quality improvement initiative, it is of particular interest to them.”

JHM Editor in Chief Andrew Auerbach, MD, MPH, and his editorial team publish some 30% of the 40-odd submissions they receive on average each month. “It was a very good paper,” Dr. Auerbach says of the Project BOOST study. Because of the importance of Project BOOST transitional care interventions, Dr. Auerbach and his team “knew it was going to be important to the field,” he adds.

In addition to its 33 citations, the Project BOOST article has received significant online attention. With an Altmetric score of 72, it is “one of the highest-scoring articles from [JHM] (#9 of 686),” according to its Altmetric page. This score reflects the article’s mentions in social media, newspapers, policy documents, and other sources.

Other factors such as the “number of tweets and downloads, the number of times people go to our website, those are also things that we look at very carefully to make sure that the journal is providing a service to people who may not be citing the papers but who want to use it just to read and to use in clinical care,” Dr. Auerbach says.

The four other top-cited articles discuss reducing inpatient falls, predicting mortality in ward patients through emergency medical records, detecting delirium to reduce hospitalization of dementia patients, and decreasing the use of non–evidence-based theories in treating bronchiolitis in pediatric patients.

The quality of researched published in JHM has changed since the journal’s debut in 2006, Dr. Auerbach says. “I think the field has developed quite a bit,” he adds. “I think the quality of research that’s happening in the field of hospital medicine is improving quite a bit, which is reflected in the type of papers we’re getting at the journal.”

In addition to 2014’s top-cited articles, the editorial team highlighted JHM’s new impact factor (IF) of 2.304, up from last year’s IF of 2.081. An IF indicates how many times the articles in a journal are cited elsewhere. “It is a very important metric for the journal, it’s very important for our authors, it’s important to our field,” Dr. Auerbach says. “It talks about how important the things we’re publishing are to other researchers.”

This increased IF ranks JHM 37 out of 153 journals in the General and Internal Medicine category of professional, peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Auerbach, whose five-year term will end in 2016, says he is “very happy with the pace of [JHM’s] improvement” and hopeful of the journal’s continued success. “We’re confident in our strategies,” he says. “I think if we keep focusing on really great papers and continue to grow the number of papers that come to the journal, we’ll be on track.”

Visit our website for more information on the Project BOOST study.

Project BOOST Study Is Journal of Hospital Medicine’s Top-Cited Article in 2014

Visit our website for more information on the Project BOOST study.