Background: Driven by meaningful use (MU) incentives, many safety net systems have adopted patient portals, which offer patients online access to their health information. Portal use correlates with increased engagement and better health outcomes, but [...]
Background: Medication reconciliation at patient care transition points is a requirement of multiple regulatory bodies in medicine. In 2005 it was rated as the #8 National Patient Safety Goal by the Joint Commission and subsequently [...]
Background: Multidisciplinary rounds, geared toward reviewing patients’ readiness for discharge, are performed daily throughout our large academic medical center. Standardization of these rounds was made a priority in order to promote patient safety and efficiency. [...]
Background: Severe sepsis is the number one cause of hospital mortality. Despite decades of bench and clinical research on sepsis, the only intervention that consistently decreases mortality is early recognition of the disease and antibiotic [...]
Background: Mobile phones enable efficient communication between healthcare providers. These devices also have the advantage of providing faster information retrieval at the point of care. Many hospitals still rely on outdated pager technology that allows [...]
Background: Recent Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) rules require hospitals to have their physicians submit inpatient admission orders and certification prior to a patient’s discharge in order to justify hospitalization reimbursement; however, CMS [...]
Background: Mobile health and health related applications have largely focused on outpatient tools with little development intended for an inpatient setting where the acute need for timely and easy to access information may be greater. [...]
Background: Communication in acute care settings is fragmented and inefficient, and consequently, patients and providers are often not “on-the-same-page” with regard to the plan of care. Care team members frequently communicate asynchronously via alpha-numeric pagers, [...]