Physicians at Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse, N.Y., are using a mobile app to collect data about hospitalists’ behaviors during patient interactions in order to provide real-time feedback.
Amit Dhamoon, M.D., Ph.D., internist at Upstate University Hospital and associate professor of medicine at SUNY Upstate Medical University, said he was looking for a way to improve physician-patient communications.
“It is still unclear why some physicians really connect with patients and some just are not able to,” he said. “It is unclear why certain patients trust certain doctors more than others. We want to look at some basic behaviors.”
His team decided to do the digital assessment using a customized version of Vocera Rounds, a mobile application that enables clinicians to collaborate in responding to patient feedback and closing care gaps. “We needed a way to collect the data, relay it, and analyze it,” he said.
Fourth-year medical students who are going into internal medicine join the team of hospitalists on their rounds and serve as “silent shoppers,” Dhamoon said. They focus on the communication aspects of each interaction, and enter their observations into an iPad. Residents and physicians also use the app to conduct a brief patient survey after the encounter.
Among other things, they assess:
• how much time the provider was in the room;
• whether the provider introduced themselves;
• whether they sat down at eye level with patient; and
• At the end of conversation, did they ask if there were any questions?
Dhamoon said patients may pick up on body language or other things that physicians are not even cognizant of. “We are focusing on how to treat gall bladder disease or make their pneumonia better. We are focusing on the medicine,” he said. “We have to do that, but we also have to communicate what we are thinking.”
In an academic medical center, it is not unusual for teams of eight to nine doctors, residents and students enter a patient’s room. “Sometimes they don’t know what to do with their hands, so they stand with their arms crossed in front of them,” Dhamoon said. “For the patient, who is lying down with an ailment, it can almost feel like an inquisition.”
Dhamoon says hospital rooms are sometimes cramped and there is not a chair available. “I can say that it should be the gold standard that we are at eye level, so it doesn’t send a message to the patient that we have one foot out the door. But if we don’t have the basic tools in place, like a chair, then it is not going to work.”
Dhamoon and his colleagues are studying the effectiveness of this training approach and its impact on patient satisfaction measured by Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) surveys. “My colleagues are incredible people. I want our patients to see how incredible they are. We get in our own way sometimes.”
