In the domain of hospital medicine, interdisciplinary bedside rounds are a collaborative approach to patient care that involves the participation of the bedside nurse, primary provider, and the patient. [1] They are often joined by family members and allied health professionals such as the patient's pharmacist and case manager.
During interdisciplinary bedside rounds, these participants visit the patient's bedside together — a type of short, interdisciplinary care team meeting. The rounds are typically conducted for all of a provider's patients on a hospital unit, one after another, with each patient's primary nurse joining for his or her patients.
Unlike conventional hospital care in which medical professionals treat patients independently and with minimal coordination, Interdisciplinary Bedside Rounds aim to foster real-time collaboration by having the whole care team converge at a patient's bedside to discuss their care and discharge plans.
This approach, by design, seeks to mitigate the risks associated with uncoordinated care, such as miscommunication, oversight, errors, and delays. Research on hospital teams show that teams make fewer mistakes than do individuals, and that team members know their responsibilities and those of their team members. [2] [3] [4]
Interdisciplinary bedside rounds aim to achieve several healthcare goals by embedding them into daily care routines:
Although IBRs, multidisciplinary rounds (MDRs), and medical rounds all aspire to enhance patient outcomes through collaboration, the three models diverge in their structure, focus, and execution. [9]
Definition: In MDRs, the healthcare team discusses patients outside the patient's presence, typically at a centralized location such as a nursing station or conference room.
Participants: MDRs are often brief "run the list" huddles between lead provider, case manager, and charge nurse, with a primary focus on discharge planning. Bedside nurses on the unit rarely attend MDRs, and if they do, they rarely have an active role.
Impact: Apart from these huddles, care providers in an MDR model largely function independently, leading to potential gaps in shared comprehension and decision-making, with different groups of health care professionals often working in isolation and with the illusion of teamwork. [10] [11]
Timing: MDRs can occur in the morning and/or afternoon
The actual execution of MDRs can vary from hospital to hospital and unit to unit. There is no official academic definition of multidisciplinary rounds.
Definition: In medical rounds, also known as ward rounds, attending rounds, and safari rounds, [9] the lead provider rounds on his or her patient at the bedside. When conducted on a teaching unit with residents and interns, the focus is on medical education for the trainees.
Participants: Medical rounds can be conducted alone, or with a team of physicians, including junior doctors and medical students. If bedside nurses and other allied health professionals join, it is typically to observe and listen in.
Timing: Medical rounds typically occur in the morning
The actual execution of ward rounds can vary from hospital to hospital, unit to unit, physician to physician, and even day to day. Attending rounds have been called the "The HumptyDumptification of Medical Discourse" because of the nonstandard nature of what is covered. [12]
In contrast, interdisciplinary bedside rounds aim to foster an integrated and collaborative approach to patient care. These rounds take place at the patient's bedside and involve the lead provider, multiple other healthcare professionals, and the patient and their family.
During IBRs, the different professions engage in a collective dialogue, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of the patient's condition, needs, and care plan. The inclusion of the patient and their family in the conversation also ensures that the care plan is tailored to the patient's needs and preferences. Inputs shared forward from multiple stakeholders are readily synthesized together to form a cohesive plan of care.
Multiple studies have found that interdisciplinary teams consistently outperform multidisciplinary teams across most evaluated metrics. [13] However, implementing successful IBRs can be challenging, leading to mixed outcomes. [14] [13]
MDRs, due to their absence of real-time, all-inclusive communication, can potentially result in missed cues, misinterpretations, and delays that negatively affect patient outcomes and satisfaction.
Conversely, IBRs aim to minimize these hazards by promoting shared decision-making, [15] enhancing interprofessional communication, [6] and placing the patient at the heart of their care. [5] These factors collectively contribute to improved care coordination, patient satisfaction, and overall care outcomes.
IBRs can be more challenging to implement than MDRs, and these challenges have been studied in detail. [16] [17] The IBR literature includes solutions that hospital units have seen work for them. [5] [6] [7] [18] [19] [20]
A well-known model of IBRs is structured interdisciplinary bedside rounds, abbreviated as SIBR rounds and pronounced "cyber."
SIBR follows a six-step process to create a shared mental model of who says what, when, and in what sequence when a care team enters the patient's room together. This structure is designed to ensure role clarity, consistency, efficiency, and sense-making.
The concept of SIBR was developed by hospitalist and quality expert Dr. Jason Stein and colleagues at Emory University Hospital in the early 2010s. [26]
The SIBR model and its inventors have won several US national awards from the Society of Hospital Medicine and attracted international attention. [27] [28] [29] The insights were recognized by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Innovation Center.
Numerous studies of various SIBR units have shown substantial improvements for clinical, [7] [21] [23] [30] throughput, [5] [15] [20] [26] [31] cost [7] and patient/staff experience and engagement outcomes, [6] [20] [32] with some having failed to achieve desired outcomes. [33] [34]
Emergency medicine is the medical speciality concerned with the care of illnesses or injuries requiring immediate medical attention. Emergency physicians specialize in providing care for unscheduled and undifferentiated patients of all ages. As first-line providers, in coordination with emergency medical services, they are primarily responsible for initiating resuscitation and stabilization and performing the initial investigations and interventions necessary to diagnose and treat illnesses or injuries in the acute phase. Emergency medical physicians generally practice in hospital emergency departments, pre-hospital settings via emergency medical services, and intensive care units. Still, they may also work in primary care settings such as urgent care clinics.
Palliative care is an interdisciplinary medical caregiving approach aimed at optimizing quality of life and mitigating suffering among people with serious, complex, and often terminal illnesses. Within the published literature, many definitions of palliative care exist. The World Health Organization (WHO) describes palliative care as "an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial, and spiritual". In the past, palliative care was a disease specific approach, but today the WHO takes a broader patient-centered approach that suggests that the principles of palliative care should be applied as early as possible to any chronic and ultimately fatal illness. This shift was important because if a disease-oriented approach is followed, the needs and preferences of the patient are not fully met and aspects of care, such as pain, quality of life, and social support, as well as spiritual and emotional needs, fail to be addressed. Rather, a patient-centered model prioritizes relief of suffering and tailors care to increase the quality of life for terminally ill patients.
Intensive care medicine, also called critical care medicine, is a medical specialty that deals with seriously or critically ill patients who have, are at risk of, or are recovering from conditions that may be life-threatening. It includes providing life support, invasive monitoring techniques, resuscitation, and end-of-life care. Doctors in this specialty are often called intensive care physicians, critical care physicians, or intensivists.
Ambulatory care or outpatient care is medical care provided on an outpatient basis, including diagnosis, observation, consultation, treatment, intervention, and rehabilitation services. This care can include advanced medical technology and procedures even when provided outside of hospitals.
Hospital medicine is a medical specialty that exists in some countries as a branch of family medicine or internal medicine, dealing with the care of acutely ill hospitalized patients. Physicians whose primary professional focus is caring for hospitalized patients only while they are in the hospital are called hospitalists. Originating in the United States, this type of medical practice has extended into Australia and Canada. The vast majority of physicians who refer to themselves as hospitalists focus their practice upon hospitalized patients. Hospitalists are not necessarily required to have separate board certification in hospital medicine.
Patient safety is a discipline that emphasizes safety in health care through the prevention, reduction, reporting and analysis of error and other types of unnecessary harm that often lead to adverse patient events. The frequency and magnitude of avoidable adverse events, often known as patient safety incidents, experienced by patients was not well known until the 1990s, when multiple countries reported significant numbers of patients harmed and killed by medical errors. Recognizing that healthcare errors impact 1 in every 10 patients around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) calls patient safety an endemic concern. Indeed, patient safety has emerged as a distinct healthcare discipline supported by an immature yet developing scientific framework. There is a significant transdisciplinary body of theoretical and research literature that informs the science of patient safety with mobile health apps being a growing area of research.
The doctor–patient relationship is a central part of health care and the practice of medicine. A doctor–patient relationship is formed when a doctor attends to a patient's medical needs and is usually through consent. This relationship is built on trust, respect, communication, and a common understanding of both the doctor and patients' sides. The trust aspect of this relationship goes is mutual: the doctor trusts the patient to reveal any information that may be relevant to the case, and in turn, the patient trusts the doctor to respect their privacy and not disclose this information to outside parties.
Narrative Medicine is the discipline of applying the skills used in analyzing literature to interviewing patients. The premise of narrative medicine is that how a patient speaks about his or her illness or complaint is analogous to how literature offers a plot with characters and is filled with metaphors, and that becoming conversant with the elements of literature facilitates understanding the stories that patients bring. Narrative Medicine is a diagnostic and comprehensive approach that utilizes patients' narratives in clinical practice, research, and education to promote healing. Beyond attempts to reach accurate diagnoses, it aims to address the relational and psychological dimensions that occur in tandem with physical illness. Narrative medicine aims not only to validate the experience of the patient, it also encourages creativity and self-reflection in the physician.
End-of-life care (EOLC) refers to health care provided in the time leading up to a person's death. End-of-life care can be provided in the hours, days, or months before a person dies and encompasses care and support for a person's mental and emotional needs, physical comfort, spiritual needs, and practical tasks.
A clinical pathway, also known as care pathway, integrated care pathway, critical pathway, or care map, is one of the main tools used to manage the quality in healthcare concerning the standardisation of care processes. It has been shown that their implementation reduces the variability in clinical practice and improves outcomes. Clinical pathways aim to promote organised and efficient patient care based on evidence-based medicine, and aim to optimise outcomes in settings such as acute care and home care. A single clinical pathway may refer to multiple clinical guidelines on several topics in a well specified context.
SBAR is an acronym for Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation; a technique that can be used to facilitate prompt and appropriate communication. This communication model has gained popularity in healthcare settings, especially amongst professions such as physicians and nurses. It is a way for health care professionals to communicate effectively with one another, and also allows for important information to be transferred accurately. The format of SBAR allows for short, organized and predictable flow of information between professionals.
A pediatric intensive care unit, usually abbreviated to PICU, is an area within a hospital specializing in the care of critically ill infants, children, teenagers, and young adults aged 0–21. A PICU is typically directed by one or more pediatric intensivists or PICU consultants and staffed by doctors, nurses, and respiratory therapists who are specially trained and experienced in pediatric intensive care. The unit may also have nurse practitioners, physician assistants, physiotherapists, social workers, child life specialists, and clerks on staff, although this varies widely depending on geographic location. The ratio of professionals to patients is generally higher than in other areas of the hospital, reflecting the acuity of PICU patients and the risk of life-threatening complications. Complex technology and equipment is often in use, particularly mechanical ventilators and patient monitoring systems. Consequently, PICUs have a larger operating budget than many other departments within the hospital.
Shared decision-making in medicine (SDM) is a process in which both the patient and physician contribute to the medical decision-making process and agree on treatment decisions. Health care providers explain treatments and alternatives to patients and help them choose the treatment option that best aligns with their preferences as well as their unique cultural and personal beliefs.
The Omaha System is a standardized health care terminology consisting of an assessment component, a care plan/services component, and an evaluation component. Approximately 22,000 health care practitioners, educators, and researchers use Omaha System to improve clinical practice, structure documentation, and analyze secondary data. Omaha System users from Canada, China, The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Turkey, the United States, and Wales, have presented at Omaha System International Conferences.
Clinical point of care (POC) is the point in time when clinicians deliver healthcare products and services to patients at the time of care.
Health care quality is a level of value provided by any health care resource, as determined by some measurement. As with quality in other fields, it is an assessment of whether something is good enough and whether it is suitable for its purpose. The goal of health care is to provide medical resources of high quality to all who need them; that is, to ensure good quality of life, cure illnesses when possible, to extend life expectancy, and so on. Researchers use a variety of quality measures to attempt to determine health care quality, including counts of a therapy's reduction or lessening of diseases identified by medical diagnosis, a decrease in the number of risk factors which people have following preventive care, or a survey of health indicators in a population who are accessing certain kinds of care.
A rapid response system (RRS) is a system implemented in many hospitals designed to identify and respond to patients with early signs of clinical deterioration on non-intensive care units with the goal of preventing respiratory or cardiac arrest. A rapid response system consists of two clinical components, an afferent component, an efferent component, and two organizational components – process improvement and administrative.
Patient satisfaction is a measure of the extent to which a patient is content with the health care which they received from their health care provider.
Cancer rehabilitation has been defined in the scientific literature as a distinct field of medicine that focuses on reducing or eliminating side-effects of cancer treatment and improving survivors' strength, ability to function and quality of life
A teaching hospital is a hospital or medical centre that provides medical education and training to future and current health professionals. Teaching hospitals are almost always affiliated with one or more universities and are often co-located with medical schools.