Background: Making the hospital discharge process faster and more predictable may help improve patient flow, reduce delays in admitting new patients, and increase hospital capacity. Some hospitals have implemented initiatives to promote timelier discharges as ways to improve hospital throughput.  We conducted a national survey of academic medical centers addressing the prevalence, importance, and effectiveness [...]

Background: Late discharges are associated with hospital overcrowding, delayed inter-unit patient transfers, lower patient satisfaction scores and longer length of stay. At our hospital, there has been a consistent discordance between the teaching and non-teaching hospitalist services in the percentages of patients discharged before 11 am, which was 8.4% (teaching teams) versus 36.4% (non-teaching teams) [...]