Background: Facilitating safe transitions of care is a common concern for the discharging hospitalist. Telephone calls are the most common method of contact for post-discharge outreach. These are labor-intensive and therefore limited in scope. To better support patients after hospital discharge, we designed and implemented a 30-day automated texting program. In a pilot study, this [...]

Background: Despite the widespread use of technology across our daily lives, many processes in the hospital remain manual and labor-intensive. As hospital medicine divisions grow, there is an increasing need for automated and scalable solutions. While many hospitals look to external vendors to provide automated solutions, these often lack customizability and gaps remain. Purpose: To [...]

Background: Facilitating safe transitions of care is a common concern for the discharging hospitalist. Telephone calls are the most common method of contact for post-discharge outreach. These are labor-intensive and therefore limited in scope. To better support patients after hospital discharge, we designed and implemented a 30-day automated texting program. In a pilot study, this [...]

Background: Adverse drug events (ADEs) are responsible for up to 770,000 inpatient injuries and deaths annually in the United States, most of which are from prescribing errors. Electronic order sets are designed to improve quality by reducing care variability and increasing efficiency of order entry, but may also facilitate prescribing errors via automation bias. There [...]

Background: Medical error is now the third leading cause of death in the United States. Approximately 4% of hospitalized patients experience an adverse event with 20% of these adverse events being medication-related, three-fourths of which are prescribing and administration errors. Vancomycin has been reported to account for one-fourth of the medication errors. Prescribing vancomycin is [...]

Background: Effective communication at hospital discharge between inpatient and outpatient providers is critical to improving transitions of care and reducing hospital readmissions. A key part of transitions communication is the hospital discharge summary (DCS). Prior studies show that DCSs are often not available to primary care providers (PCPs) at the time of hospital follow-up and [...]

Background: Automated bidirectional text messaging has emerged as a compelling strategy to facilitate communication between patients and the health system after hospital discharge. Understanding the unique ways in which patients interact with these messaging programs can inform future efforts to tailor their design to individual patient styles and needs. The aim of this study was [...]

Background: Studies have shown geographically co-locating patients of the same physician (also known as regionalization) have improved provider satisfaction and increased team efficiency and collaboration. At most institutions, including ours, assigning physicians to patients and units is done manually. Furthermore, interventions to regionalize hospitals in the literature focus on grouping conditions, specialties, or teams (i.e., [...]

Background: Despite the widespread use of technology across our daily lives, many processes in the hospital remain manual and labor-intensive. As hospital medicine divisions grow, there is an increasing need for automated and scalable solutions. While many hospitals look to external vendors to provide automated solutions, these often lack customizability and gaps remain. Purpose: To [...]