Background:  The rapidly changing and increasingly complex hospitalist work environment has placed new focus on provider burnout and resilience. As hospitalist leaders seek tools to address these issues, the design thinking process offers a novel user-centered approach. Initially developed in the tech industry, design thinking moves quickly and iteratively through five stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and [...]

Background: Electronic health applications that aim to share personalized medical information with patients are not frequently found in hospital settings. These inpatient applications can empower patients and caregivers to review and monitor their most updated medical information and improve communication between patients and their providers (such as clinicians, nurses, case managers etc.). However, these applications [...]

Background: In 2014, UCLA Health embarked on a journey to train and inspire the future generation of medicine. The Healthcare Improvement & iNnovation in Quality (THINQ) Collaborative aims to radically shape care delivery by building transformative interdisciplinary platforms to catalyze and nurture innovation at UCLA that lead to large-scale impact. Further, THINQ aspires to engage [...]

Background: Recently, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) put forth their latest expectations of residents using Entrustable Professional Activities (EPA). Furthermore, prompted by an interest in improving the health of the population, enhancing the experience and outcome of the patient, and reducing the per capita [...]

Background: The Exercises in Clinical Reasoning (ECR) series in the Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM) is a unique and growing series of 30 case-based problem-solving manuscripts, designed to teach the foundations of clinical reasoning to both educators and students. For selected cases, the ECR team has produced teaching materials, including PowerPoints of ECR cases [...]

Background: Internist trainees have traditionally acquired radiology skills in a piecemeal manner, either through elective rotations or through informal “radiology rounds” on inpatient medicine rotations. here is no comprehensive curriculum for teaching basic radiology to internal medicine (IM) residents, and their image interpretation skills are limited (1). Additionally, the rise of the electronic medical record [...]

Background: Delirium is associated with high morbidity and mortality in hospitalized older adults. Sleep is a modifiable risk factor for delirium. Eye masks (EMs) and earplugs (EPs) have been shown to improve sleep and effective reduce delirium in the ICU. This study examines the clinical usability of this intervention component in general medicine patients. We [...]

Background: Hospital associated injury is the third leading cause of death in the United States. Lack of communication about patient safety issues among care team members and with patients is a key source of hospital errors and patient harm, and making errors more visible is a key strategy to reduce negative outcomes. Electronic health record [...]

Background: Practical and financial pressures have placed a renewed focus on improving the human experience of healthcare from both the patient and provider perspective. Despite this, aligning patients and interdisciplinary providers around meaningful experience improvement in the inpatient setting remains elusive. We sought to develop an innovative interdisciplinary design process for experience improvement on a [...]

Background: Acutely-ill and multimorbid patients are frequently exposed to unintended medication errors after admission and their impacts on patient safety are profound. Designated ward-pharmacists as team members of our Hospital Medicine Center reconcile medications of hospitalized patients by identifying discrepancies in patients’ current medications and the medication used in acute care in emergency departments or [...]