Background: Hospitalization is often stressful and confusing for patients and families, and hospitalists play a pivotal role in helping navigate complex treatment plans, integrating multiple consultant and ancillary service recommendations, and providing guidance and reassurance. To achieve this, hospitalists need to quickly develop rapport with patients and families. However, most hospital medicine patients are unable [...]

Background: At our institution, bedside co-rounding with physicians and nurses has been promoted as a mechanism to facilitate care team communication. However, coordinating bedside co-rounding can be logistically challenging and time consuming, especially when patients and care team members are not geographically co-localized. Little is known on how bedside co-rounding impacts patient experience. We aimed [...]

Background: Effective communication affects cancer management and outcomes and is particularly essential in the last year of life when medical complexity peaks. In the last decade, adoption of telemedicine and other advances may have affected patient experience and communication effectiveness. The purpose of this study is to assess racial disparities and trends in patient experience [...]

Background: Hospital length of stay (LOS) is an important metric for evaluating a healthcare system’s quality of patient care, patient experience and outcomes, efficiency of practice, and resource management. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a significant increase in the average hospital LOS in the United States. Hospital LOS has continued to remain high due to [...]

Background: Caring for multiple patients with complex needs, especially those with behavioral and psychosocial challenges, can contribute to burnout and dissatisfaction in clinical work [1]. A recent internal survey of hospitalists within our division identified managing such patients as the primary barrier to sustainable clinical work. However, the definition of “complexity” varies between hospitalists and [...]

Background: Patients’ names are pronounced incorrectly during medical encounters, but there is limited literature on the impact name pronunciation has on patient experience. At our quaternary care center, there is no system to communicate the pronunciation of a patient’s name. Our clinical experience on the cardiology service highlighted the negative effects of name mispronunciation on [...]

Background: Patient experience is critical in the quality of care delivered in hospitals and is closely linked to better clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction. Hospitalized patients under the care of hospitalists often face challenges related to communication, understanding their plan of care, and feeling connected to their healthcare team. Enhancing patient experience in this setting [...]

Background: As a strategy to improve throughput and efficiency, Vanderbilt University Hospital implemented geographic localization across several Hospital Medicine (HM) teams and units. This large-scale structural change presents an opportunity to not only improve efficiency and quality metrics, but to improve other patient-centered outcomes including patient experience. Purpose: To assess the impact of a hospital [...]

Background: Patient experience is a key indicator of healthcare quality, influencing both satisfaction and outcomes. Despite ongoing efforts to improve care, many patients continue to report unmet needs or concerns, particularly in the late afternoon and evening hours. Addressing these concerns before the end of the day is essential to enhancing overall patient experience. Purpose: [...]

Background: Hospitalized patients often report that they lack the opportunity to share their priorities, and currently there is no standard protocol for hospitalists to elicit their patients’ priorities. Additionally, changes in 2025 to CMS reimbursement rules will require hospitals to have protocols for eliciting what matters to admitted patients, further necessitating the development of an [...]