Background: Recent research highlights that in-hospital communication increasingly is relying on secure electronic messaging with notable unintended consequences, including increasing task switching and the overall burden of communications. This study sought to quantify non-actionable, non-urgent messages to better understand their prevalence and to develop interventions aimed at optimizing communication workflows. Methods: A qualitative content analysis [...]

Background: Secure text messaging systems that allow for bidirectional communication between a sender and recipient, instead of relying on unidirectional alphanumeric text or numeric-only messages, have fundamentally changed inpatient communications. At our institution, all clinical team members utilize the same secure messaging platform (Voalte). We aimed to explore physician and nurse overall satisfaction with our [...]

Background: Automated bidirectional text messaging has emerged as a compelling strategy to facilitate communication between patients and the health system after hospital discharge. Understanding the unique ways in which patients interact with these messaging programs can inform future efforts to tailor their design to individual patient styles and needs. The aim of this study was [...]

Background: Secure text messaging platforms are increasingly replacing traditional paging systems for in-hospital communication1,2. At our institution, the number of secure texts per month nearly doubled from 4.4 million in September 2020 to 8.1 million in September 2023. This growing burden of automated notifications from secure texts without a framework to triage message urgency contributes [...]

Background: A key factor contributing to physician burnout is what is known as “pajama time”—the time spent on clinical tasks outside of regular working hours. For inpatient physicians, responding to after hours texting may contribute significantly to pajama time. Purpose: At our large, urban academic medical center, 163 medicine residents rotate through the general medicine [...]