Background: Facilitating safe transitions of care is a common concern for the discharging hospitalist. Telephone calls are the most common method of contact for post-discharge outreach. These are labor-intensive and therefore limited in scope. To better support patients after hospital discharge, we designed and implemented a 30-day automated texting program. In a pilot study, this [...]

Background: Communicating to physicians about electronic health record (EHR) software updates is important for maintaining clinical workflow and preserving patient safety. However, reaching providers with mass e-mails is challenging; the optimal strategy for educating providers about EHR updates remains unclear. Purpose: Modify our communication strategy to improve inpatient physicians’ understanding of EHR software updates. Description: [...]

Background: Facilitating safe transitions of care is a common concern for the discharging hospitalist. Telephone calls are the most common method of contact for post-discharge outreach. These are labor-intensive and therefore limited in scope. To better support patients after hospital discharge, we designed and implemented a 30-day automated texting program. In a pilot study, this [...]

Background: Effective interpersonal communication is critical in healthcare. Historically, pagers, phone calls, and in-person conversations have been the main form of in-hospital communication. New communication technologies, such as electronic messaging, are increasingly becoming the primary way for healthcare workers to communicate. In 2017, 27% of Society of Hospital Medicine responding organizations reported some use of [...]

Background: The medical rounds are the most essential process in care of the hospitalized patients. If the patients do not receive enough information about the round-time, they cannot arrange their personal time in the hospital. The object of this study is to investigate the effect of the real-time round notification using text messages on the [...]

Background: Our large academic medical center has no standardized paging process. Communication between nurses and internal medicine (IM) providers occurs through an alphanumeric one-way paging system. The majority of the pages are non-urgent and often only include a call back number. Non-urgent pages can cause provider fatigue, particularly during high volume messages. Additionally, unclear text [...]

Background: Secure text messaging is a primary mode of clinician-to-clinician communication in large acute care hospitals. However, the accessibility and ease of secure messaging, and a lack of best practice recommendations, raise the risk of overuse. Multitasking demands from secure messaging challenge clinicians as they engage in focus-intensive patient care tasks. To address this, we [...]

Background: Many electronic health record (EHRs) systems offer secure messaging which allows for asynchronous, text message-based communication. Increasingly electronic messaging is replacing more traditional methods of communication such as paging, yet there is limited research on the impact of this transition. Studies have shown that healthcare workers find text communication to be more efficient than [...]

Background: Following discharge from hospital, Community Care Teams (CCT) continue the care of patients with chronic medical problems. Handover is by means of discharge summary with no further communication between Inpatient Teams (IPT) and CCT. When problems arise, CCT refer patients to the Emergency Department (ED) and re-admissions back to IPT are not infrequent. Purpose: [...]

Background: Recent research highlights that in-hospital communication increasingly is relying on secure electronic messaging with notable unintended consequences, including increasing task switching and the overall burden of communications. This study sought to quantify non-actionable, non-urgent messages to better understand their prevalence and to develop interventions aimed at optimizing communication workflows. Methods: A qualitative content analysis [...]