Background: The United States sees over 35 million hospital discharges a year with a 20% readmission rate. Unplanned readmissions amount to 20 billion dollars annually. Efforts to prevent readmissions impact patient’s overall morbidity/mortality and alleviate the financial burden on health care systems. To that effect, the United States health care reform, under the Affordable Care […]

Background: Physicians spend more time on documentation and less on direct patient care. Burnout and career disengagement have been linked to time spent documenting in the electronic health record. A scribe program could reduce the documentation burden on hospitalists, increase revenue capture and improve the efficiency of the admission process. Purpose: We implemented a prospective […]

Background: Hospitalized patients often crave information about their illness. As many as 70% of outpatients use the internet for this purpose. However, little is known about how often hospitalized patients search for medical information online. Methods: Between June 2018 and October 2018, we conducted a survey of patients hospitalized in our academic hospital medicine service. […]

Background: Recently there has been an explosion of smartphone apps with emphasis to improve healthcare of patients. With a poverty rate of 32% Cameron County is one of the poorest areas in the country. Compounded with a high prevalence of inadequate health literacy (45%), patients admitted to the hospital are unable to provide an accurate […]

Background: Physician burnout impacts job satisfaction and turnover with significant financial and operational costs in addition to the negative impact on patient care. Organizations are increasingly focused on methods to improve physician resilience. Our study aims to explore the impact of difficult patient encounters on hospitalist resilience to inform future individual and organizational efforts to […]

Background: Joint Commission has identified “communication” as the third most frequent root cause of sentinel events.1 Alpha-numeric pagers are common for communication among healthcare professionals. Pagers are not HIPAA compliant and communication through pagers often lacks sufficient information for effective communication.2 Because pager communication is one-way, closed loop communication requires a return telephone call, disrupting […]

Background: Patient lists and patient assignment aid hospitalists through their workflow. Lack of a standardized approach has led to various ways of patient assignment and various means to display them. With the evolution of electronic medical records and technology; patient assignment and their display theoretically should have been more straight forward however there are still […]

Background: Health care systems around the country are struggling with faculty and staff burnout. It is established that burnout leads to higher employee turnover and poorer patient outcomes. The Big Read is a hospitalist-led institution-wide initiative in which a large number of faculty/staff/trainees/students are invited to read and discuss the same book within a 3 […]

Background: Rising inpatient census, limited physical space and unpredictable admission rates introduce communication inefficiencies among doctors, nurses and patients. Purpose: At UC San Diego Health System, we aimed to streamline communication among physicians, patients and other care team members. Description: Two operational changes were made: 1) establishment of team-based geographic cohorting and 2) segregation of […]

Background: Discharging patients is a complicated process that requires planning, coordination and communication between multiple care team members. Ideally this process begins at admission and is updated in real time as the patient care plan evolves and discharge needs become known. Discharge plans are often made using some form of static communication, such as in-person […]