Background: A fifth of older adults discharged from the hospital require readmission within 30 days. Readmissions impose an enormous burden on both patients and the healthcare system. Previous investigations have found that less than half of discharged patients are able to understand and execute the discharge plan and are likely to overestimate their comprehension of [...]

Background: Hospitalized patients often crave information about their illness. As many as 70% of outpatients use the internet for this purpose. However, little is known about how often hospitalized patients search for medical information online. Methods: Between June 2018 and October 2018, we conducted a survey of patients hospitalized in our academic hospital medicine service. [...]

Background: Patient & Family Advisory Councils (PFACs) are groups of patients and caregivers who share their overall experiences of care and perspectives on specific topics with hospital leaders at regular meetings. PFACs provide a crucial supplemental layer of feedback to hospitals outside of HCAHPS survey data and post-discharge phone calls. Hospital Medicine specific PFACs are [...]

Background: Interdisciplinary team-based care is a promising concept in hospital medicine in which healthcare team members representing multiple disciplines collaborate to develop patient care plans. Multiple published studies showed that team based care is associated with decreased length of stay (LOS).1,2Patient-Centered Approach to Health (PATH) team was a redesign of the Structured Interdisciplinary Bedside Rounding [...]

Background: The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality recommends a structured, patient-centered discharge communication process. To create patient-centered discharge communication, it is vital to understand the information that patients value upon discharge. Little is known about how patients prioritize discharge information; therefore, our objective was to determine the perceptions of hospitalized patients about the relative [...]

Background: Unplanned hospital readmissions are a burden on patients and cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars each year in the United States1. Multi-component interventions have been the most effective at readmission reduction.2. But with hospital resources spread thin, it may not be necessary or even feasible to provide a multicomponent intervention for all discharging [...]