Background:   Academic medical centers are complex healthcare delivery systems that are quickly adopting electronic health records (EHR) nationwide while still using alpha-numeric paging for physicians-in-training raised with cell phones, texting, messaging, and newer technologies.  Understanding workflow processes for these providers of patient care are key to finding solutions to improve healthcare quality and safety.   [...]

Background:  Most patient discharges(DC) from hospitals occur in the afternoons, thus creating patient flow and potentially patient safety issues. This creates increased ER boarding hours and delays interunit patient transfers between ICU, stepdown and medical units. Sick patients may not be getting the appropriate level of care due to lack of higher level of care beds. Purpose:  To increase [...]

Background: Acute Medical Assessment Units (AMAU) in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand improve inpatient flow and quality. It is critical to spread such best practices. Qatar, a GCC state (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and UAE) has tremendous recent population growth stressing the healthcare system. Hamad General Hospital (HGH), the main national hospital, [...]

Background: Research suggests that COPD patients with low peak inspiratory flow rate (PIFR,

Background: Keeping admitted patients in the emergency room (ER) carries negative operational and clinical consequences. Prolonged stays reduce ER bed turnover, thereby limiting access for other patients. Furthermore prolonged ER length of stay (LOS) has shown to be an independent risk factor for 30 day mortality for admitted patients. For these reasons, Veterans Affairs (VA) [...]

Background: Late discharges are a known barrier to patient flow.  Our project was to identify barriers to early discharges and develop processes to increase early discharges from the inpatient medicine teams.   Purpose:  “Daily afternoon multidisciplinary team huddles will increase the % of discharge orders before 10am by 10% on the medicine teams by June 2015” Description: We initially analyzed reasons [...]

Abstract Text: Background: Safely and efficiently moving patients through the admission process is a key concern for emergency and hospital medicine faculty. Our hospitalist group admits approximately 400 patients per month, each admitting physician evaluates approximately 7.5 patients per  shift, utilizing individual approaches. We aimed to improve the quality of our admissions by  standardizing our [...]