Background: Multidisciplinary rounds (MDRs) or discharge huddles in the hospital were developed to enhance safety and streamline discharge by improving communication between members of the patient care team. Despite efforts to coordinate care around a single brief daily meeting, multiple aspects of the patient’s care can change throughout the day. Keeping all members of the [...]

Background: Quality improvement and patient safety (QI/PS) methods are being used to drive positive change in healthcare. To date, these efforts have led to slow and inconsistent change. Insufficient expertise remains a significant rate-limiting step at many institutions. To address this barrier, trainees need opportunities to learn about and participate in QI/PS. At the University [...]

Background: The prevalence of delirium among hospitalized patients ranges up to 56% and results in increased hospital mortality and duration of hospitalization. Symptoms of delirium may be subtle in early stages and may present clinically as hyperactive, hypoactive or mixed type. As such delirium often evades early detection. In addition, delirium in the hospital setting [...]

Background: Vascular access is an integral part of inpatient care. Difficult access can result in delays and inappropriate access selection or technical placement can have quality and financial implications, particularly those associated with catheter-line associated blood stream infections (CLABSI). At our institution, vascular access had historically been provider driven resulting in non-standardized selection practices with [...]

Background: Telemetry is utilized on high risk cardiac patients for monitoring of arrthymias. Guidelines providing clear monitoring indications have been published by AHA to reduce overuse of this resource, which can lead to increased care costs and false positive alerting. Despite the above evidence, our hospital has a high volume of patients on telemetry causing [...]

Background: Long discharge times (DT), (the time from discharge order to patient leaving room), have detrimental impacts on any hospital. Apart from causing dissatisfaction among patients and their families who are waiting to go home, prolonged DT also increases wait times for patients being admitted from the ED. Delayed admissions pursuant to late discharges, caused [...]