Background: Sleep disruptions for routine care, such as vital sign assessments, are common during hospitalization and are associated with negative health outcomes and patient satisfaction. While higher risk patients may benefit from increased monitoring at night, the tradeoff is less obvious for lower risk patients. We hypothesized that assigning overnight vital sign assessment based on [...]

Background: Sleep disruptions for routine care, such as vital sign assessments, are common during hospitalization and are associated with negative health outcomes and patient satisfaction. While higher risk patients may benefit from increased monitoring at night, the tradeoff is less obvious for lower risk patients. We hypothesized that assigning overnight vital sign assessment based on [...]

Background: With access to big data in medicine, it is becoming increasingly necessary to use tools to automate the pooling of data into relevant thematic structures. Topic modeling is most often used to uncover these thematic structures in large sets of textual data. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is one such algorithm-based topic model that has [...]

Background: Physicians spend more time on documentation and less on direct patient care. Burnout and career disengagement have been linked to time spent documenting in the electronic health record. A scribe program could reduce the documentation burden on hospitalists, increase revenue capture and improve the efficiency of the admission process. Purpose: We implemented a prospective [...]

Background: Discharging patients is a complicated process that requires planning, coordination and communication between multiple care team members. Ideally this process begins at admission and is updated in real time as the patient care plan evolves and discharge needs become known. Discharge plans are often made using some form of static communication, such as in-person [...]

Background: Sitting at the bedside improves patients’ perception of their interactions with their physicians. Despite these data, prior work shows that medicine interns sit during only 9% of observed physician-patient interactions. We aimed to assess perceived importance of and barriers to sitting at the bedside among a group of internal medicine residents. These results have [...]

Background: Understanding communication between providers and patients is key to providing patient-centered care. We sought to determine if patient’s perception of time spent by physician at bedside is associated with patient satisfaction with physician communication. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional survey of patients admitted to the hospital medicine service. The survey included questions about patient’s [...]

Background: Physicians and nurses often overestimate patients’ understanding of their illness, medications, treatments, and care plans. Fragmented discussions can lead to inconsistent conveyance of key information to patients and their caregivers. Multidisciplinary bedside rounds are an essential opportunity to facilitate patient-centered care. Our medical-surgical units did not have a standardized approach to ensuring consistent, clear [...]

Background: In an academic center, a physician team may be comprised of medical students, interns, residents, fellows and an attending. Patients encounter multiple members from the same physician team and this often leads to confusion in regards to their individual care. It is evident that this leads to patient confusion and misunderstandings can ensue. A [...]

Background: Based on the study “Jobs, Careers, Callings: People’s Relations to their Work,” we wanted to see whether how residents intrinsically view their occupation affects their work engagement and burnout. We used the same three categories: “job” defined as viewing your occupation as a means to an end, “career” as focusing on advancement and prestige, [...]