Background: Hospital discharge summaries are critical to transitions of care as they are oftentimes the only substantive form of communication that accompanies patients to their next care setting. The lack of interoperability in our healthcare IT ecosystem amplifies the need for discharge summaries to mitigate subsequent duplication of services and increased costs. These documents must [...]

Background: Design thinking is a framework for creative problem solving. When the design thinking process (often leveraged in fields outside of healthcare delivery) is applied, it leads to a human-centered path to innovation. The infusion of deep empathy, holistic examination, inclusive collaboration, and effective iteration fosters sustainable solutions for complex human concerns. In traditional problem-solving, [...]

Background: Hospital systems are increasingly focusing on health equity, including identifying and addressing social drivers of health and healthcare disparities. Conventional quality improvement (QI) approaches have been used to address disparities with varying success. In our health system, using QI to increase use of interpreters has been the primary intervention for improving outcomes in patients [...]

Background: Mentorship has long been an impactful process in the training of medical students and physicians. It is apparent that young professionals benefit from mentorship, but how to maximize this benefit is unknown. We elected to approach the revitalization of our mentorship program through a 6-month human centered design (HCD) project to form a curriculum [...]

Background: Mentorship and sponsorship (a relationship of professional support and endorsement) are both teachable and learnable skills that are crucial for medical faculties to have in academic medicine. Unfortunately, these skills are rarely formally taught or measured as part of faculty development. Medical education has started to incorporate more structured mentoring (typically by assigning each [...]

Background: Mentorship and sponsorship (a relationship of professional support and endorsement), are essential avenues for professional success, combatting burnout, and improving equity and representation of women and URMs in medicine. Unfortunately, traditional measures of mentorship quality and success are one-dimensional and are of limited value; academic medicine rarely teaches menteeship or mentorship skills, relies on [...]