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: It is challenging for care teams to learn about hospitalized older adults with Alzheimer’s Disease and other related dementias (ADRD). Life stories – interventions that collect patient’s personal narratives, histories, likes and dislikes and share them with care teams – are one innovation developed to enhance person-centered care. Few studies have explored the implementation [...]

Background: Hospitalization is often stressful and confusing for patients and families, and hospitalists play a pivotal role in helping navigate complex treatment plans, integrating multiple consultant and ancillary service recommendations, and providing guidance and reassurance. To achieve this, hospitalists need to quickly develop rapport with patients and families. However, most hospital medicine patients are unable [...]

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: It has long been established that a critical aspect of high-quality patient care is patient-physician communication.1,2 There can be a variety of potential barriers to this communication, and one such barrier might be the use of contact isolation. Indeed, studies have shown that contact isolation does pose the risk of reducing face-to-face time between [...]

Background: Up to 18% of clinic patients are considered difficult by their providers. (1,2) Common characteristics of difficult outpatients are the presence of personality disorders, depression, anxiety, somatization and requesting pain medications. (1,2, 5) Two qualitative studies suggest that inpatient medicine providers also regularly experience hospitalized patients as difficult. (3,4) However, there have been no [...]

Background: Hospitalized patients who are at high-risk for mortality and readmission represent a unique population requiring tailored interventions to improve care outcomes. Advance care planning (ACP) conversations in the inpatient setting can help align care goals with patient preferences, yet their influence on measurable clinical outcomes in this vulnerable population is not well understood. Methods: [...]

Background: Effective communication affects cancer management and outcomes and is particularly essential in the last year of life when medical complexity peaks. In the last decade, adoption of telemedicine and other advances may have affected patient experience and communication effectiveness. The purpose of this study is to assess racial disparities and trends in patient experience [...]

Background: As hospitalists take over additional patient care duties in teaching hospitals, many issues that impact residents are now being experienced by hospitalists. Previous studies have shown that between 22% and 27.7% of nighttime pages were nonurgent, including patient-status updates, low-priority order request, and non-critical lab values. Unnecessary interruptions distract from patient care, contribute to [...]