Background: Patient-physician communication is essential to medical care. Simple physician behaviors, such as sitting at the bedside, may bolster patient-physician communication.1-3 Yet despite the potential benefit of sitting, prior work suggests that inpatient physicians do not sit frequently.1,4 Methods: Trained staff performed in-person surveys of patients admitted to seven general internal medicine teaching services from [...]

Background: Effectively communicating information to a patient is the driving force for a successful physician-patient relationship. Patient outcomes depend on successful communication. As efficiency metrics and clinical productivity remain top priorities for most health systems, time spent with each patient gets affected hindering effective patient-physician communication. This in turn affects the HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment [...]

Background: Sitting at the bedside improves patients’ perception of their interactions with their physicians. Despite these data, prior work shows that medicine interns sit during only 9% of observed physician-patient interactions. We aimed to assess perceived importance of and barriers to sitting at the bedside among a group of internal medicine residents. These results have [...]

Background: Effective provider communication improves patients’ satisfaction, engagement, and health outcomes. Sitting at the bedside may improve communication; however, many providers do not regularly sit during inpatient encounters. We conducted a controlled pre-post evaluation of adding wall-mounted folding chairs inside the entrance of patient rooms, coupled with education, to increase sitting at the bedside by [...]

Background: In an academic center, a physician team may be comprised of medical students, interns, residents, fellows and an attending. Patients encounter multiple members from the same physician team and this often leads to confusion in regards to their individual care. It is evident that this leads to patient confusion and misunderstandings can ensue. A [...]

Background: The Institute of Medicine includes patient-centeredness as an essential component of high-quality patient care. One dimension of patient-centeredness is the need for physicians to provide clear communication to patients (1). The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey also measures physician communication skill.Patient perception of physician communication is complex. Visual aids [...]

Background: : Low patient satisfaction can result in financial loss for hospitals, and potentially for individual physicians or groups and patient satisfaction is known to be lower on academic services.1 Increasingly, Medicare funds will be withheld from hospitals for underperformance in patient satisfaction due to Value Based Purchasing (VBP).  We identified a low performing, academic [...]