Background: Transforming hospital operations to optimize patient experience begins with a collaborative care team. The geographic re-location of physicians into one unit with an entire care team, in addition to the implementation of Structured Interdisciplinary Bedside Rounds (SIBR), have been linked to multiple outcomes related to effective care team communication and collaboration, including patient safety [...]

Background: Enhanced physician-nurse collaboration improves patient outcomes. Current interprofessional clinical learning environments, however, rarely engage physicians with nurses and are not based on high-performance team frameworks. Therefore, leaders at the University of Chicago Medicine developed the Improving GME Nursing Interprofessional Team Experiences (IGNITE) program to engage interprofessional healthcare teams, with hospitalist coaches, in institutional performance [...]

Background: Failure to follow-up on lab tests and radiology results can lead to major patient safety concerns due to missed or delayed diagnoses and can be a cause for litigation for health care practitioners. With increasing patient loads, the volume of follow-up testing and clarifications to documentation needed for billing can be a significant burden [...]

Background: Overuse of daily labs (DL), especially CBC and BMPs in hospitalized patients leads to increased costs and utilization of resources, iatrogenic anemia, and patient discomfort. Prior quality improvement (QI) efforts in hospital medicine have worked to reduce excessive lab utilization, but few have focused on labs ordered on the day of discharge (LOD) . [...]

Background: Lab testing is critical for clinical decision-making and used throughout healthcare systems. Overuse of lab testing is known to be commonplace and contributes to shortages in lab testing materials. While practices exist at medical institutions that aim to limit lab test overuse, it is unclear which interventions are effective. Methods: We aimed to reduce [...]

Background: Studies, particularly the MARQUIS trial, have demonstrated the value of pharmacist-led medicine reconciliation. At our institution, we partnered with the College of Pharmacy to implement, revise, and grow a novel hospitalist-led transitions of care pharmacy student rotation. Pharmacy students work directly with attending hospitalists to address admission medication reconciliation errors and collaborate in the [...]

Background: Many studies have demonstrated the negative effects of emergency department (ED) crowding on outcomes, including increased length of stay, inpatient mortality, and risk of readmission. Early evidence suggests effective and timely triage of patients with hospitalist input can mitigate some of the detrimental effects of ED crowding. In contrast to prior studies focused on [...]

Background: The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Foundation developed the Choosing Wisely project in 2012 as a way to identify commonly used tests that may be overused or inappropriately used. The Society of Hospital Medicine created a subcommittee in this project focused on recommendations affecting hospitalists, and made the recommendation in 2013 to stop [...]

Background: US healthcare costs are exorbitant and excessive lab utilization contributes significantly1. Daily labs (DLs) are often over-ordered for inpatients.2 This leads to increased costs, iatrogenic anemia, patient discomfort and limits phlebotomy resources 3. The Choosing Wisely® campaign recommends against checking DL in patients who have clinical and lab stability5. Previous quality improvement initiatives have [...]

Background: Early discharge from the hospital improves hospital throughput as well as patient and staff satisfaction. At times, our emergency room tends to board many admitted patients for more than 24 hours, which further distresses our patients and staff. We noticed that the total number of patients leaving the hospital earlier in the day decreased [...]