Care Team Fact Sheets: An Intervention to Improve Communications, Understanding, And Satisfaction Between Patient And Provider

Hospitalized patients often have a large number of physicians caring for them including primary hospitalist and additional consultant teams. Further, in a teaching hospital, residents and fellows can multiply the number of providers a patient meets, often leading to patient confusion and ineffective communication. Our research objective is to study whether Care Team Face Sheets with labeled photographs of the patient\u27s primary medical team will improve hospitalized patients’ ability to identify at least one of their primary hospital physicians by name. Further, we will assess if these sheets are associated with improvements in important patient measures including physician communication, plan-of-care understanding, and overall satisfaction with their hospitalization. We hypothesize that patients in the intervention group may have a better relationship with the physicians in their treatment team, which could lead to better communication, understanding, and satisfaction scores than a control group. Because this intervention a novel multistep process of navigating a dedicated website to create the Face Sheet, then providing it to the patient as part of the physician introduction, we predict that widespread adoption will not be immediate and preliminary survey data support this. Our aim is for the Face Sheet to be distributed to at least 60 percent of patients on hospitalist teams prior to the final data collection for our primary research objective. Multiple PDSA cycles have been performed to increase adoption of the Face Sheet among hospitalist teams, with interventions including educational, authoritative, visual reminders, and serial adherence assessment with direct feedback. Data collection and PDSA cycling is currently ongoing for intervention adoption. Our study includes hospitalized adults on the academic hospitalist service for whom English is a preferred language. Patients were screened for inclusion and baseline data collected prior to the Face Sheet intervention. The process above will be repeated after the successful introduction (defined as greater that 60 percent distribution) of Face Sheets on the academic hospitalist service. We will use an intention to treat analysis to compare a post-intervention sample to pre-intervention controls