Background: Interdisciplinary clinical rounds at the bedside can promote the core principles of patient- and family-centered care, including promoting respect and dignity, information sharing, and participation by the patient in the care and decision making.  However, despite rounding at the bedside, the patient can still be a bystander as the team presents a care plan [...]

Background: Shared decision-making (SDM) has been shown to be an important tool for improving patient engagement and health care outcomes. Despite the demonstrated value of SDM across disciplines, little is known about how to increase SDM in general inpatient settings. We sought to evaluate the effectiveness of an educational bundle on inpatient resident teams’ abilities [...]

Background: Issues with the quality and safety of hospital care have been well-documented, and serve as the basis for improvement strategies and research. However, what is less understood are the perspectives of patients, families, caregivers, and other stakeholders regarding what they feel are the most important targets of improvement research. We systematically engaged a broad [...]

Background: Patient & Family Advisory Councils (PFACs) are groups of patients and caregivers who share their overall experiences of care and perspectives on specific topics with hospital leaders at regular meetings. PFACs provide a crucial supplemental layer of feedback to hospitals outside of HCAHPS survey data and post-discharge phone calls. Hospital Medicine specific PFACs are [...]

Background: Health research is rapidly evolving to include patient stakeholders (patients, families and caregivers) as active members of research teams. The proliferation of published frameworks describing the conceptual foundations underlying this engagement, and strategies detailing best practice activities to support this process has led to a diffusion of information. Therefore, the aims of this study [...]

Background: In shared decision making models, decisional conflict is a measure of uncertainty and readiness and comfort level in making a decision. The literature examining decisional conflict is currently relatively immature. The act of a patient being readmitted is, in part, an effect of multiple small decisions a patient makes in the time between index [...]

Background: Hospitalized patients often require post-acute care (PAC) after discharge ranging from long-term acute care hospitals (LTACH) to home health services. However, patients waiting for discharge to PAC are at risk for delayed discharges [1], which can increase in-hospital complications, increase costs, and decrease access to hospital care for other patients. [2, 3] Disposition prediction [...]

Background: As members of the patient experience committee, we aimed to identify areas of opportunity to improve the HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) scores. By analyzing the data through the utilization of our analytics tool provided by the patient and customer experience department, we noticed trends in the regional demographics in [...]

Background: Driven by meaningful use (MU) incentives, many safety net systems have adopted patient portals, which offer patients online access to their health information. Portal use correlates with increased engagement and better health outcomes, but there are many challenges to effectively engage patients and meet MU metrics in safety net settings. Purpose: We implemented a [...]

Background: Increasingly, hospitalizations are becoming more complex and patients are frequently discharged from the hospital with new medical diagnoses, medications, and need for close follow up care (1,2). In 2009, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act published meaningful use rules for using the Electronic Health Record (EHR), which included that the [...]