Background: Most academic general medical services cover patients across several different care units in the hospital. Studies have shown that de-regionalized care leads to a lack of team cohesion and poor communication between healthcare providers. Prior studies have shown that teamwork improves patient outcomes and increases health care worker satisfaction. However, little information using validated [...]

Background: Hospital associated injury is the third leading cause of death in the United States. Lack of communication about patient safety issues among care team members and with patients is a key source of hospital errors and patient harm, and making errors more visible is a key strategy to reduce negative outcomes. Electronic health record [...]

Background: Regulatory agencies have set a 60-minute window to communicate positive CT PE (computed tomography pulmonary embolism) results to ordering providers. Improving the effectiveness of communication among caregivers for critical results of tests is a national patient safety goal. Our current system of communicating positive results to providers was inconsistent (mean time to verbal report [...]

Background: Interprofessional teamwork in healthcare organizations is crucial to the delivery of quality patient care. Efforts to improve teamwork on hospital medicine units commonly fail due to clinicians and other care team members (case managers and pharmacists) are responsible for patients scattered across numerous floors and units. UK HealthCare developed and implemented the Interprofessional Teamwork [...]