Background: Team-based approaches have been broadly promoted to improve healthcare delivery in the U.S. However, few studies have analyzed the complexities of team-based communication in the current healthcare delivery landscape of increasing electronic health record (EHR) use and the rapidly evolving EHR functionalities. Major hurdles to studying effective communication within and between healthcare teams include: […]

Background: High functioning medical teams are essential for providing safe and efficient medical care. To assess team culture on a medical-surgical unit, we conducted an abridged version of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (ARHQ) Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture. Two areas of opportunity were identified: management support for a climate that promotes […]

Background: Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems are broadly used to support the delivery of patient care and to facilitate communication and coordination among providers.  The use of EHR has been demonstrated to improve health care quality and efficiency. However, the impact of how providers utilize EHRs and communicate information in care delivery remains unclear. Specifically, how do […]

Background: Comanagement is a structured collaboration between hospitalists and a surgical service to improve outcomes of surgical patients perioperatively. We identified the potential to improve patient safety and throughput metrics on the Surgical Oncology and Otolaryngology (ENT) services at our institution. We partnered with these two services to create a novel Surgical Oncology Comanagement Service. […]

Background:    Electronic consults (“e-consults”) are commonly used in the outpatient setting to allow subspecialists to provide documented recommendations to primary care doctors without a face-to-face patient encounter. In the inpatient setting, a consult that does not require a patient encounter is often handled via informal conversation (“curbside consult”) – the consultant is not reimbursed […]

Background: Consultative medicine is an important part of Internal Medicine (IM) resident education. According to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, residents are expected to “act in a consultative role to other physicians and health professionals.” However, individual programs each have the ability to integrate the consultative experience into training in their own unique […]

Background: Consultative medicine has been identified as a core part of internal medicine (IM) resident education by providing the opportunity for residents to care for the non-medical patient. In the early 1980s, two separate academic institutions detailed the initiation of their General Medicine Consultation service. They described who consulted them and the reason for consultation. […]

Background:  The Society of Hospital Medicine considers stroke care a core competency in hospital medicine.  It also challenges hospitalists to lead, coordinate, and participate in multidisciplinary efforts to improve stroke care within their organizations.  Hospitalist trainees will be better positioned to accomplish this if they have a broad exposure to the continuum of stroke care […]

Background: Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) improves physicians’ clinical decision-making through refining the skills of asking a clinical question, searching for and appraising the literature and then properly applying it to patient care. While EBM has been implemented as an essential module across medical schools worldwide, most graduates are not well versed in the fundamentals of effectively […]

Background: Stress and burnout are pervasive among health care professionals and both have been associated with health problems and poorer quality of patient care. Among health care professionals, hospitalists are especially prone to stress and burnout.  The practice of mindfulness, which involves paying attention to the present moment without judgment, can provide a more skillful […]