Improving Communication with Family Members during a Global Pandemic: Effect on Patient Experience.

Objectives: Communication with patients and their families/caregivers to facilitate informed decision making is an integral part of patient/family-centered care. Due to the high coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection rates and limited personal protective equipment, healthcare systems were forced to restrict patient visitors, limit patient-provider interactions, and implement other changes in treatment protocols that disturbed traditional communications and risked eroding patient/family-centered care and adversely affected patient satisfaction. This article focuses on changes in patient experience in two dedicated COVID-19 units of an academic medical center located in the US South as a result of the enhanced communication process implemented specifically during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Evaluating Outcomes and Time Delays of a Non-Trainee-Driven Hospitalist Procedure Service.

Background And Objectives: Ultrasound guidance has become standard of care in hospital medicine for invasive bedside procedures, especially central venous catheter placement. Despite ultrasound-guided bedside procedures having a high degree of success, only a few hospitalists perform them. This is because these are usually performed by radiologists or in the setting of trainee-run procedure teams.

Inpatient Telehealth and Coronavirus Disease 2019 Outcomes: Experiences in Alabama.

During the early months of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, hospitals were concerned about preserving personal protective equipment. UAB Hospital Medicine designed a strategy to outfit acute care patient rooms on a COVID-19 unit with telemedicine technology to allow for remote clinician rounding. To describe one hospital's experience with inpatient telehealth and compare outcomes between patients with and without inpatient telehealth visits.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham COVID-19 Collaborative Outcomes Research Enterprise: Developing an institutional learning health system in response to the global pandemic.

Introduction: As a local response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) established the UAB COVID-19 Collaborative Outcomes Research Enterprise (CORE), an institutional learning health system (LHS) to achieve an integrated health services outcomes and research response.

Methods: We developed a network of expertise and capabilities to rapidly develop and deploy an institutional-level interdisciplinary LHS. Based upon a scoping review of the literature and the Knowledge to Action Framework, we adopted a LHS framework identifying contributors and components necessary to developing a system within and between the university academic and medical centers.

Critical Success Factors for Addressing Discharge Inefficiency at a Large Academic Medical Center: A Lean Six Sigma Approach.

Background: Delayed discharges can be a systemic issue. Understanding the systemic factors that contribute to discharge inefficiencies is essential to addressing discharge inefficiencies.

Purpose: This article reports on a Lean Six Sigma approach and the process to identifying inefficiencies and systemic barriers to early discharge in a large US academic medical center.

Using Accountable Care Teams to Improve Timely Discharge: A Pilot Study.

Background And Objective: Hospitals worldwide are faced with the problem of discharging patients on time. Delayed discharge creates domino effects with significant implications for hospitals. The accountable care team (ACT) is a multidisciplinary, unit-based approach to identifying opportunities to improve patient care and address inefficiencies in care delivery and throughput, including assuring timely discharges.

A critical analysis of COVID-19 research literature: Text mining approach.

Objective: Among the stakeholders of COVID-19 research, clinicians particularly experience difficulty keeping up with the deluge of SARS-CoV-2 literature while performing their much needed clinical duties. By revealing major topics, this study proposes a text-mining approach as an alternative to navigating large volumes of COVID-19 literature.

Materials And Methods: We obtained 85,268 references from the NIH COVID-19 Portfolio as of November 21.