Background: Clinicians face an overwhelming volume of communication through various channels, including phone calls, text messages, emails, in-person interruptions, and secure messaging systems. This information overload is increasing[1] and poses significant challenges. Despite the availability of communication tools, failures in communication remain the leading cause of preventable medical errors [2]. Secure messaging systems, while essential, [...]

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: With the advent of the Electronic Medical Record (EMR), documentation occupies up to 50% of doctors’ time1 and prior work has revealed that internal medicine residents spend more than four hours daily on documentation2. Secure messaging (SM) has been recently integrated into the inpatient EMR system, allowing healthcare team members to directly message physicians; [...]

Background: Early discharges from inpatient units improve throughput from the Emergency Department (ED) and reduce ED boarding. ED boarding increases patient safety events, provider burnout, and decreases patient satisfaction. Multidisciplinary communication between hospitalists, nursing staff and case management is essential for facilitating early discharges from inpatient medicine units. Such communication frequently requires in-person care coordination [...]

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: Clinicians face an overwhelming volume of communication through various channels, including phone calls, text messages, emails, in-person interruptions, and secure messaging systems. This information overload is increasing[1] and poses significant challenges. Despite the availability of communication tools, failures in communication remain the leading cause of preventable medical errors [2]. Secure messaging systems, while essential, [...]

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 [...]

Background: Secure text messaging systems that allow for bidirectional communication between a sender and recipient, instead of relying on unidirectional alphanumeric text or numeric-only messages, have fundamentally changed inpatient communications. At our institution, all clinical team members utilize the same secure messaging platform (Voalte). We aimed to explore physician and nurse overall satisfaction with our [...]

Background: Evidence suggests female physicians experience higher rates of burnout compared to male counterparts1,2. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a recognized source of physician burnout (4,5,6). Therefore, efforts to understand gender disparities in EHR use may offer insights into burnout disparities at large. Studies in outpatient settings have found female physicians spend more time [...]