Background: Delays in the discharge process of hospitalized patients impact patient flow and lead to increased costs and slower progression of care. As hospitalist work becomes increasingly shift based, there are concerns for proper patient handoffs and hesitancy with clinical progression of care overnight. This leads to daytime patient flow congestion and is a significant [...]

Background: Delays in the discharge process of hospitalized patients impact patient flow and lead to increased costs and slower progression of care. As hospitalist work becomes increasingly shift based, there are concerns for proper patient handoffs and hesitancy with clinical progression of care overnight. This leads to daytime patient flow congestion and is a significant [...]

Background: Delays in the discharge of the hospital ward patients cause a backlog for new admissions from the Emergency Department, and transfers from the Intensive Care Units and telemetry units. This bottleneck unnecessarily increases overall resource utilization and also negatively impacts patient care and satisfaction. Therefore, our Internal Medicine Residency Program aimed through this quality [...]

Background: The pediatric discharge education process currently struggles with a lack of standardization, miscommunication between care team members, and non-patient-centered discharge communication. These issues contribute to medical errors, increased readmissions, patient dissatisfaction, and unnecessary healthcare costs. The purpose of this study is to understand the current level of caregiver comprehension in our hospital, streamline the [...]

Background: Long discharge times (DT), (the time from discharge order to patient leaving room), have detrimental impacts on any hospital. Apart from causing dissatisfaction among patients and their families who are waiting to go home, prolonged DT also increases wait times for patients being admitted from the ED. Delayed admissions pursuant to late discharges, caused [...]

Background: Efficient discharge planning for hospital medicine patients requires alignment across multiple disciplines. Understanding how clinicians communicate information about discharge readiness can identify opportunities to improve discharge coordination and impact length of stay, hospital capacity, and patient satisfaction. The objective of this study was to outline the existing information gathering and communication pathways around discharge [...]

Background: The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) is a post-discharge survey which captures patient experience during and after hospitalization (1). Previous studies have demonstrated that high quality discharge communication is vital for patient safety, with poor communication leading to decreased medication adherence, unplanned readmissions, and poorer health outcomes—important implications for both [...]

Background: Targeted approaches for early discharge times have been utilized to improve patient flow, but literature shows sparse evidence for hospital-wide efforts and mixed benefits for the length of stay and readmission rates. Furthermore, there is limited data for this approach across a large academic medical center. We set an aim to increase the percentage [...]