Background: Physician handoffs between inpatient shifts influence safety and care quality. Handoffs are also at risk for communication failures. Poor care coordination and miscommunication cause 80% of sentinel events nationwide. The rise of the electronic medical record (EMR) presented an opportunity to standardize communication during handoffs. Unfortunately, this potential has thus far gone largely unrealized, [...]

Background: Given the widespread adoption of electronic health record systems, the majority of patient orders are now enacted through electronic orders. We aimed to describe the average number of electronic orders entered for medicine patients hospitalized at different levels of care and determine if electronic ordering patterns reflected patient acuity and severity of illness. Methods: [...]

Background: Time motion studies are often conducted to describe activities of physicians caring for hospitalized patients with the goal of improving efficiency and patient safety. Prior work has mostly focused on trainees at academic medical centers. However, with the growth of hospital systems, most academic hospitals now have a similar number of patients cared for [...]

Background: Health information technology (HIT) systems were created with the intent to improve efficiency and streamline clinical workflows. However, evidence suggests HIT systems are a significant source of clinician burnout (Adler-Milstein 2020). A thorough understanding of clinicians’ frustrations is necessary to develop solutions to improve HIT systems. In doing so, efforts from the clinical informatics [...]

Background: Health information technology (HIT) systems, though designed to improve clinical workflow efficiency, have ironically contributed to clinician burnout, especially among hospitalists who depend on these systems for patient care and coordination (Adler-Milstein 2020). Addressing these challenges requires a detailed, resource-intensive process to identify workflow inefficiencies. Because this process is difficult, it is often performed [...]

Background: Career exploration and professional identity formation (PIF) are critical in undergraduate medical education (UME). With its focus on management of acutely ill, hospitalized patients, Hospital Medicine (HM) is an opportune environment for pre-clinical students to gain valuable, diverse clinical experiences. While widely utilized in UME, shadowing on HM direct-care services (HM-DCS) (i.e., those without [...]