Background: Hospitalists generally work one week on, one week off. Different hospitalists group switch on different days of the week, with almost all days of the week reported as switch days in the literature. It is unclear if choosing a particular day of the week as the switch day has an impact on length of [...]

Background: Obtaining the Best Possible Medication History (BPMH) is the protocolized gold standard in obtaining medication histories and well known to decrease the total number of medication errors during transitions in care. Trained technicians require an average of 15-30 minutes to collect a BPMH [2]. Our facility conducted a categorical analysis and within subject study [...]

Background: Medication reconciliation programs are a well-recognized important tool in reducing medication discrepancies and subsequently decreasing patient harm, particularly at transitions of care. Medication reconciliation programs have demonstrated error reductions upward of 66% [1-4]. 39% of prescription medication history errors have the potential to cause moderate or severe discomfort or deterioration in a patient’s condition [...]

Background: With growing importance placed on patient safety, it has become necessary to elevate past processes and rethink rolls for experienced healthcare professionals. One of the primary goals identified by The Joint Commission is to “maintain and communicate accurate patient medication information” to “safely prescribe medications in the future” [1]. This task is often complicated [...]

Background: Nurse Practitioners (NPs) and Physician Assistants (PAs) are a vital part of a Hospital Medicine Group (HMG). Many NPs and PAs join HMGs directly after graduating and without prior experience in Hospital Medicine. The anticipation of a new position brings many emotions. There is excitement, but there is also hesitation. The introductory phase in [...]

Background: Our 165-bed community hospital is in a phase of rapid growth due to demographic changes and expansion of services offered within the hospital. While offering unprecedented level of healthcare access to the community, improvement with emergency department (ED) throughput has emerged as one of our challenges from a patient safety perspective. Unnecessarily prolonged ED [...]

Background: A discharge summary serves as a crucial means of communication between inpatient and outpatient providers. Appropriate transitions of care rely on updates to patient problems, diagnostics, treatment history, and discharge plans. Many studies have identified lacking components in discharge summaries that may lead to poor medical management.In an effort to improve patient transitions of [...]

Background: Patients with complex medical problems are at high risk of readmission when transitioning from the hospital to home, especially when they reside in rural areas (as is the case within our VA Health Care System (HCS)). Innovative solutions are needed to improve access to post hospitalization follow up within our facility. We hypothesized that [...]

Background: Patients with advanced cancer have high readmission rates, up to 27% in some studies, and represent unique challenges related to transitions of care, complex disease management, and care coordination. Recent efforts have focused on better identification of potentially avoidable readmissions (PARs). One study found that primary reasons for PARs in cancer patients included pre-mature [...]

Background: Communication between home health care agencies and referring facilities is important for comprehensive care for patients. Yet, both home health care providers and hospitalists feel that this communication is frequently lacking. Purpose: To implement weekly teleconferences to discuss patients recently discharged from the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center (RMR VAMC) who are initiating [...]