Background: Conducting Family–Centered Rounds (FCR) has become a common practice in pediatric hospital medicine. As many learners may be a part of the pediatric inpatient team for a brief time, orientation to the goals and processes of FCR is often difficult. Additionally, many faculty physicians are challenged in finding the right opportunity for constructive feedback [...]

Background: Assignment of a patient to a ward team is a challenging task. If one were to take into account every variable involved in order to maximize quality of care, placing a patient on a team would be overly burdensome. To counter this, some groups retrospectively assign patients in the morning when teams arrive. Retrospective [...]

Background: The hospital is an urban facility with 453 licensed beds. The hospitalist group is the only hospitalist service operating in the hospital and will perform over 14,000 admissions in 2011. In 2009, we recognized that the traditional model, where a rounding hospitalist team cares for patients scattered across various floors while starting with a [...]

Background: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provide financial incentives to hospitals that demonstrate meaningful electronic health record (EHR) implementation. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 specifies meaningful use; for hospitals, there are 24 objectives of which 14 are mandatory, including maintaining an up–to–date problem list. For stage one of meaningful [...]

Background: Patients’ poor understanding of medical information discussed during their hospital admission can result in lack of adherence to treatment plans and poorer health outcomes. Improving communication with patients can not only improve patient satisfaction and engagement but can also improve quality of care. Little is known about available tools to improve hospitalist communication with [...]

Background: The Institute of Medicine report on health literacy called for incorporation of health literacy assessment into healthcare information systems, as well as large–scale epidemiologic studies of the effects of health literacy on clinical outcomes. To our knowledge, no institution has incorporated health literacy screening into routine clinical practice. Purpose: The Health Literacy Screening (HEALS) [...]

Background: Hospital discharge is a vulnerable moment for patients, and poor primary care access threatens follow–up. New models that include hospitalists in post–discharge care could improve post–discharge access. Purpose: The Post Discharge Clinic (PDC), a hospitalist–staffed clinic based in a large academic ambulatory practice, was established to create access to outpatient follow up for patients [...]

Background: Hospital discharge is a stressful and hazardous venture for older adults. Recent research documents that up to 49% of patients experience at least one medical error, and one in five patients discharged from the hospital suffer an adverse event. More than half of these adverse events are preventable or ameliorable. A common result of [...]

Background: A coordinated, standardized hospital discharge process helps to ensure a safe and adequate transition in care. All patients need to clearly understand discharge instructions, have access to discharge medications and have a plan for follow–up care prior to leaving the Hospital. Purpose: To implement a discharge process that incorporates communication and coordination of care [...]

Background: Patient satisfaction is an important quality performance measure directly impacts the reputation of the hospital and long–term financial performance of the hospital. In our hospital, Press–Ganey patient satisfaction scores for medical floors/hospitalists’ were in the first to tenth percentile compared with the surgical and telemetry floors at the 99th percentile. A multidisciplinary team was [...]