Background: Hospitalized patients and their families often face challenges in accessing and understanding developments in care plans, test results, and interdisciplinary decisions made during their stay. This knowledge gap causes anxiety, confusion, and missed opportunities for shared decision-making. Enhanced interdisciplinary communication and transparency with patients positively impacts patient satisfaction, readmission rates, patient safety and adherence [...]

Background: Patient portals are a digital health technology that help caregivers engage with their child’s healthcare. Unfortunately, significant disparities in portal use exist, with caregivers who speak languages other than English (LOE) having lower usage rates compared with their English-speaking counterparts. No pediatric study has sought to understand why and how LOE caregivers use patient [...]

Background: Patient portals are intended to engage caregivers with their child’s healthcare by allowing them to read clinical notes, access test results, make appointments, and message providers, and they are often used during hospitalization. While patient portals typically offer multiple language options, the extent to which medical information is translated remains limited. Understanding how caregivers [...]

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 [...]

Background: The period immediately following discharge from a hospital admission is a vulnerable time for patients. Preventable adverse outcomes occur here for various reasons: discontinuity between hospitalists and primary care physicians, changes to medication regimens, and complex discharge instructions [1]. Many of these precipitating factors can be avoided by effective exchange of health information and [...]

Background: Hospitalized patients and their families often face challenges in accessing and understanding developments in care plans, test results, and interdisciplinary decisions made during their stay. This knowledge gap causes anxiety, confusion, and missed opportunities for shared decision-making. Enhanced interdisciplinary communication and transparency with patients positively impacts patient satisfaction, readmission rates, patient safety and adherence [...]