Background: Facilitating safe transitions of care is a common concern for the discharging hospitalist. Telephone calls are the most common method of contact for post-discharge outreach. These are labor-intensive and therefore limited in scope. To better support patients after hospital discharge, we designed and implemented a 30-day automated texting program. In a pilot study, this [...]

Background: Facilitating safe transitions of care is a common concern for the discharging hospitalist. Telephone calls are the most common method of contact for post-discharge outreach. These are labor-intensive and therefore limited in scope. To better support patients after hospital discharge, we designed and implemented a 30-day automated texting program. In a pilot study, this [...]

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: The medical rounds are the most essential process in care of the hospitalized patients. If the patients do not receive enough information about the round-time, they cannot arrange their personal time in the hospital. The object of this study is to investigate the effect of the real-time round notification using text messages on the [...]

Background: Secure text messaging is a primary mode of clinician-to-clinician communication in large acute care hospitals. However, the accessibility and ease of secure messaging, and a lack of best practice recommendations, raise the risk of overuse. Multitasking demands from secure messaging challenge clinicians as they engage in focus-intensive patient care tasks. To address this, we [...]

Background: Many electronic health record (EHRs) systems offer secure messaging which allows for asynchronous, text message-based communication. Increasingly electronic messaging is replacing more traditional methods of communication such as paging, yet there is limited research on the impact of this transition. Studies have shown that healthcare workers find text communication to be more efficient than [...]