Background: In hospital-based medicine, maintaining an open line of communication between inpatient teams and community pediatricians serves as an essential component of providing comprehensive patient care and ensuring continuity at time of discharge. At St. Louis Children’s Hospital, inpatient resident teams are responsible for providing timely communication with community pediatricians regarding major patient events. Despite [...]

Background: Physician handoffs between inpatient shifts influence safety and care quality. Handoffs are also at risk for communication failures. Poor care coordination and miscommunication cause 80% of sentinel events nationwide. The rise of the electronic medical record (EMR) presented an opportunity to standardize communication during handoffs. Unfortunately, this potential has thus far gone largely unrealized, [...]

Background: In recent years, in large part due to reimbursement incentives, the healthcare industry has shifted focus from volume to quality of care, with patient satisfaction being a crucial part of the evaluation. There is growing recognition that patient satisfaction is at least in part linked to clinician satisfaction and burnout(1). Thus, there is a [...]