Background: Following the COVID-19 pandemic, bedside rounding at our institution diminished significantly, resulting in reduced patient engagement, fragmented communication, and loss of shared situational awareness. Evidence shows that interdisciplinary rounds improve patient comprehension, teamwork, and care quality (O’Leary et al., 2010), reduce communication failures (Stein et al., 2020), and support safer transitions of care (Ramaswamy et al., 2021). In 2022, our institution sought only to restore multidisciplinary bedside rounds. Yet once revitalized, these rounds unexpectedly became a platform for expansive institutional innovation.
Purpose: To describe how revitalizing multidisciplinary bedside rounding, which originally intended simply to reestablish patient-centered communication, additionally served as a catalyst for broader system redesign, including data integration, learner engagement, patient-facing tools, nighttime communication structures, and a growing multilingual interdisciplinary framework.
Description: A phased redesign reintroduced bedside rounds using a standardized communication script across medicine, nursing, pharmacy, PT/OT, case management, social work, and multiple trainee groups. The structure emphasized consistent presence, shared mental models, and real-time documentation. As rounds stabilized, emergent needs were addressed through discipline-specific subgroups and new communication pathways including night-shift teams.While the original goal of restoring bedside rounds was met, the most significant outcomes were the secondary operational and educational innovations that arose because of the collaborative infrastructure established through rounding. These included:• A multilingual “FIT” (Focused Interdisciplinary Team) framework, now expanding across multiple units, supporting linguistically concordant communication with patients and families• A multilingual “Patient Deliverable Tool” embedded in the EHR• Night-shift rounding groups, strengthening continuity and situational awareness• Discipline-specific micro-groups (pharmacy, PT/OT) contributing tailored data to daily plans• Enhanced inter-professional learner engagement with structured observation and participation• New real-time data streams that now support quality dashboards, discharge planning, and transitions-of-care metrics• Improved patient experience, with patients consistently reporting better understanding and involvement• Stronger coordination between day and night teams, enabled by shared formats and expectations
Conclusions: Rebuilding multidisciplinary bedside rounds did far more than restore a communication practice. Not only interdisciplinary rounding support safety, teamwork, and patient comprehension, as has been previously described (O’Leary et al., 2010; Stein et al., 2020; Gittell et al., 2000), but at our institution rounds became a foundation for innovation. It enabled multilingual process design to address language inequities, patient-facing communication tool development, stronger inter-professional education, and improved data-driven care coordination. This initiative demonstrates that when teams engage consistently at the bedside using a shared structure, the resulting relational coordination can spark system-level redesign far beyond the scope of rounding itself.