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: 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: Discharge planning plays a critical role in managing hospital length of stay (1). We report on the implementation of a program in a large hospital system where health care providers were requested to estimate and record the Medically Ready for Discharge Date (MRDD) in the electronic health record (EHR) for hospitalized patients to facilitate [...]

Background: Discharge planning is an important component of safe and efficient hospital care. While standardization of these practices can be useful, adopting general approaches may overlook important nuance for unique patient populations. In particular, we are interested in how patients who live in a baseline unsafe situation conceptualize a “safe” discharge plan. Thus, our study [...]

Background: Discharging complex patients at an academic tertiary care center requires comprehensive evaluation, interprofessional coordination, and meticulous planning to address what is needed to ensure safe and timely discharges. Misalignment across care team members on discharge needs and barriers can lead to a delayed discharge which may result in poor patient satisfaction, increased task burden [...]

Background: Improving hospital throughput is critical to optimizing patient flow and capacity, particularly during periods of high census and ED boarding which can adversely impact patient experience and have downstream safety implications. Prolonged length of stay may result from inadequate alignment among care team members on patients expected to discharge, insufficient communication of discharge barriers, [...]

Background: High hospital readmission rates have both clinical and financial consequences which are associated with worse healthcare outcomes for our patients and costly financial penalties for the hospital. The average cost of a readmission estimated to be at $15,200 and adds burden on hospital systems, resources, and cause further harm to our patients, leading to [...]