Start Date

5-28-2020 11:00 AM

End Date

5-28-2020 12:00 PM

Description

Background and Aim

  • Communication between physicians and nurses is a cornerstone of high-quality inpatient care.
  • HIPAA-compliant text-based methods offer an alternative to the pager for communication between nurses and physicians.
  • While messaging is popular in the personal setting, text-based professional communication in hospitals may increase the number of messages without improving coordination between care providers. (1)
  • In addition, urgent messages that are more appropriately calls could be missed by the physician, leading to a delay in action. Other institutions use triage systems to communicate a question or clinical change by the urgency of expected physician response, which have attempted to mitigate this issue. (2)
  • We aimed to improve bidirectional communication between housestaff and nursing with a communication process developed jointly by both parties using QI methods such as stakeholder analysis and a structured Work-Out session to brainstorm solutions.

Keywords

communication, physician, nursing, quality improvement

Comments

Presented at the 2020 House Staff Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Conference

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May 28th, 11:00 AM May 28th, 12:00 PM

Process design for optimizing text-based communication between physicians and nurses

Background and Aim

  • Communication between physicians and nurses is a cornerstone of high-quality inpatient care.
  • HIPAA-compliant text-based methods offer an alternative to the pager for communication between nurses and physicians.
  • While messaging is popular in the personal setting, text-based professional communication in hospitals may increase the number of messages without improving coordination between care providers. (1)
  • In addition, urgent messages that are more appropriately calls could be missed by the physician, leading to a delay in action. Other institutions use triage systems to communicate a question or clinical change by the urgency of expected physician response, which have attempted to mitigate this issue. (2)
  • We aimed to improve bidirectional communication between housestaff and nursing with a communication process developed jointly by both parties using QI methods such as stakeholder analysis and a structured Work-Out session to brainstorm solutions.