Over the past few years, the councils of the Right Care Alliance have been developing lists of “Top Ten Do’s and Don’ts” for their specialties, to identify specific evidence-based recommendations that address both overuse and underuse.
Last week, the Hospital Medicine Council, in collaboration with the Community Engagement Council, reached a critical milestone in this project by having their “Top Ten” published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Council leaders Hyung Cho and Surafel Tsega, council members Charlie Wray, Samantha Malone, Fima Macharet, Ankush Bansal, and Mary Lacy, and other council members worked to brainstorm a list of over 30 top do’s and don’ts in hospital medicine, refine the list using a Delphi voting process, write explanations and provide evidence for each item, and write up the results of the process for academic publication.
A key part of their process for developing the list was collaborating with patient advocates in the Community Engagement Council to incorporate patient perspectives in their recommendations of how hospitals can improve patient care.
Here are a few of their Top Ten recommendations for hospital medicine:
- Do provide verbal or written communication to the patient’s primary care provider prior to discharge
- Don’t order daily labs in the presence of clinical stability or in the absence of a specific clinical question
- Do implement programs designed to promote sleep in the inpatient setting
- Don’t order computed tomography (CT scans) of the head to evaluate inpaient delirium in the absence of neurological findings
You can read the full article online. Congratulations to all the authors and council members!