Background: Joint physician-nurse rounding is an important best practice that facilitates communication and patient participation in their care while improving outcomes and satisfaction. Interdisciplinary bedside rounding has been shown to reduce mortality, lengths of stay, medication errors, and readmissions while improving staff engagement, teamwork, and patient experience (1, 2, 3). In 2018, our hospital added [...]

Background: Rising inpatient census, limited physical space and unpredictable admission rates introduce communication inefficiencies among doctors, nurses and patients. Purpose: At UC San Diego Health System, we aimed to streamline communication among physicians, patients and other care team members. Description: Two operational changes were made: 1) establishment of team-based geographic cohorting and 2) segregation of [...]

Background: Effective communication between the inpatient care team, patients and their families is an integral part of high quality, safe care while inpatient and during transitions of care. Collaborative, highly functioning interdisciplinary teams can impact the perception of that care by the patient and family. A multidisciplinary team at Utah Valley Hospital piloted an accountable [...]

Background: Growing antimicrobial resistance, C. difficile infection and cost have triggered a greater reliance on antimicrobial stewardship. Most stewardship models rely upon a central team, often led by ID specialists, to oversee prescribing in an institution. However, there are limitations to this paradigm. Purpose: We believe opportunities exist for hospitalists to drive stewardship by integrating [...]

Background: Geographic hospitalist staffing and interdisciplinary rounding has been shown to improve staff communication, patient communication, and reduce length of stay. Communication between hospitalist and nurses also play a crucial role in patient safety and hospital throughput. Despite its importance, maintaining geography is difficult and communication between physicians and nurses are often sub-optimal and fragmented. [...]

Background: Interdisciplinary rounding at the bedside is associated with improvements in patient flow metrics, interdisciplinary communication, and patient perception of teamwork among care team members. At UC San Diego Health, FIT (Focused Interdisciplinary Team) Rounding has been the standard of care on seven diverse patient care units since 2017. However, with the arrival of the [...]

Background: Interdisciplinary rounding at the bedside is a recognized practice for improving patient care, communication, and teamwork. The Focused Interdisciplinary Team (FIT) Rounding model at UCSD has been in place since 2017. Since its implementation, our focus has been on sustaining the standardization of rounding practices and monitoring the impact of FIT on care quality [...]

Background: VTE is associated with considerable morbidity and mortality, in fact, as many as 10% of deaths of hospitalized patients have been contributed to pulmonary embolism.1 The ACP and AACP in their 2011 and 2012 guidelines, respectively, recommend that all hospitalized patients be evaluated for risk of VTE, and subsequent prophylaxis be initiated if benefits [...]