Improving Interdisciplinary Communication on an Academic Hospitalist Service: A Quality Improvement Project

Effective communication is essential for quality patient care, and paging remains among the most common forms of communication despite the introduction of secure texting platforms. The goal of this project was to use quantitative and qualitative analyses of paging to guide improvements in paging best practices. A retrospective analysis of pages sent over a 7-day period was completed, characterizing the volume, content, and effectiveness of pages both preintervention and 3-month postintervention. The content of each page was categorized into laboratories, medications, vital signs, diet, patient assessment/clinical change, pain, or miscellaneous/other. Effectiveness was based on the following five critical elements: (1) two patient identifiers, (2) the sender's name, (3) the sender's callback number, (4) priority or acuity of the page, and (5) patient-care concern. Pages were considered successful if they contained all the five essential elements. The preintervention results guided interventions. Of 3,483 included pages, 1,806 and 1,677 were sent during the preintervention and postintervention periods, respectively. Adherence to all essential paging elements increased from 15.2% to 40% (p < .001). The largest deficiency was labeling the urgency of a page, which increased from 31.6% to 51.9% (p < .001). Quantitative and qualitative analyses of pages effectively guided this project to increase the standardization of paging.