The Relationship Between Hospital Interdepartmental Transfers and Patient Experience.

This study examined the association between interdepartmental transfers and the perceptions of care received by adult patients who were admitted and discharged from a 300-bed, not-for-profit community tertiary hospital in the Midwest. Transfers of patient care are daily and frequent hospital processes. However, limited attention has focused on the effect that intrahospital transfers of care have on the patient experience. Understanding this relationship is important, since value-based purchasing models directly tie patient experience measures into hospital reimbursements. The key finding of this study indicates that as patients' transfers increase, their perceptions of care decrease. Therefore, by reducing the frequency of interdepartmental transfers, patient satisfaction may increase. This research provides clinicians and administrators a better understanding of the relationship between a frequent and a daily hospital process (ie, interdepartmental transfers) and its influence on patients' perceptions of their experience.

Optimal older adult emergency care: introducing multidisciplinary geriatric emergency department guidelines from the American College of Emergency Physicians, American Geriatrics Society, Emergency Nurses Association, and Society for Academic Emergency Medicine.

In the United States and around the world, effective, efficient, and reliable strategies to provide emergency care to aging adults is challenging crowded emergency departments (EDs) and a strained health care system. In response, geriatric emergency medicine (EM) clinicians, educators, and researchers collaborated with the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), American Geriatrics Society (AGS), Emergency Nurses Association (ENA), and the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) to develop guidelines intended to improve ED geriatric care by enhancing expertise, educational, and quality improvement expectations; equipment; policies; and protocols. These "Geriatric Emergency Department Guidelines" represent the first formal society-led attempt to characterize the essential attribute of the geriatric ED and received formal approval from the boards of directors for each of the four societies in 2013 and 2014. This article is intended to introduce EM and geriatric health care providers to the guidelines, while providing proposals for educational dissemination, refinement via formal effectiveness evaluations and cost-effectiveness studies, and institutional credentialing.

Optimal older adult emergency care: introducing multidisciplinary geriatric emergency department guidelines from the American College of Emergency Physicians, American Geriatrics Society, Emergency Nurses Association, and Society for Academic Emergency Medicine.

In the United States and around the world, effective, efficient, and reliable strategies to provide emergency care to aging adults is challenging crowded emergency departments (EDs) and strained healthcare systems. In response, geriatric emergency medicine clinicians, educators, and researchers collaborated with the American College of Emergency Physicians, American Geriatrics Society, Emergency Nurses Association, and Society for Academic Emergency Medicine to develop guidelines intended to improve ED geriatric care by enhancing expertise, educational, and quality improvement expectations, equipment, policies, and protocols. These Geriatric Emergency Department Guidelines represent the first formal society-led attempt to characterize the essential attributes of the geriatric ED and received formal approval from the boards of directors of each of the four societies in 2013 and 2014. This article is intended to introduce emergency medicine and geriatric healthcare providers to the guidelines while providing recommendations for continued refinement of these proposals through educational dissemination, formal effectiveness evaluations, cost-effectiveness studies, and eventually institutional credentialing.