Background: Effective interpersonal communication is critical in healthcare. Historically, pagers, phone calls, and in-person conversations have been the main form of in-hospital communication. New communication technologies, such as electronic messaging, are increasingly becoming the primary way for healthcare workers to communicate. In 2017, 27% of Society of Hospital Medicine responding organizations reported some use of [...]

Background: The medical rounds are the most essential process in care of the hospitalized patients. If the patients do not receive enough information about the round-time, they cannot arrange their personal time in the hospital. The object of this study is to investigate the effect of the real-time round notification using text messages on the [...]

Background: The hospital setting can be stressful for both patients and providers. The lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic such as staffing shortages, hospital overcrowding, and provider burnout have only exacerbated this problem. In 2023, we undertook a study aimed at improving the wellness of both patients and providers. Data gathered from this study will [...]

Background: The “10 commandments of consultation” were published in 1983 and revised in 2007. Since then, academic medical centers have grown significantly, expanding the number of non-teaching teams. This rapid growth risks straining the current subspecialty consultation services’ teaching and educational models. Overuse of consultations and lack of clarity in the consulting question may increase [...]

Background: Interprofessional collaboration (IPC) is vital for high-quality patient care, and effective IPC among medical professionals, especially trainees, is crucial to supporting positive individual and team outcomes. Measuring IPC and understanding its impact on patient care remains underexplored. Understanding which IPC patterns are associated with better patient and individual outcomes will inform how to best [...]

Background: Effective communication between the inpatient care team, patients and their families is an integral part of high quality, safe care while inpatient and during transitions of care. Collaborative, highly functioning interdisciplinary teams can impact the perception of that care by the patient and family. A multidisciplinary team at Utah Valley Hospital piloted an accountable [...]

Background: With the advent of the Electronic Medical Record (EMR), documentation occupies up to 50% of doctors’ time1 and prior work has revealed that internal medicine residents spend more than four hours daily on documentation2. Secure messaging (SM) has been recently integrated into the inpatient EMR system, allowing healthcare team members to directly message physicians; [...]

Background: By law, patients have prompt access to electronic discharge notes in their charts. Technical language and abbreviations make notes difficult to read and understand for a typical patient. Large language models such as GPT-4 may have the potential to transform these notes into patient-friendly language and format. Our objective was to determine whether GPT-4 [...]

Background: Diagnostic consultations between the General Internal Medicine (GIM) departments and specialty departments are becoming increasingly important to achieve team-based diagnosis and diagnostic excellence, but there have been limited studies on the appropriateness of the GIM diagnostic consultations with specialty departments. We conducted this study to clarify the appropriateness of diagnostic consultations from the GIM [...]

Background: Hospitalizations for opioid overdose and complications of opioid use disorder (OUD) have risen dramatically over the last two decades. Hospitalizations represent opportunities to initiate lifesaving medications for OUD (MOUD), but rates of hospital MOUD initiation are low. Addiction consult services (ACS) can help facilitate hospital MOUD initiation and promote linkage to post-discharge MOUD, but [...]