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: 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; [...]