STRONGER TOGETHER for Better Care
Multidisciplinary Rounds:
A team approach to patient care
by Valerie Briones-Pryor, MD
As a hospitalist, I have learned that medicine, particularly inpatient medicine, is a team sport. Unlike my surgical or subspecialist colleagues, I do not perform any procedures or put in lines at the bedside. However, I have always said that my specialty as a hospital medicine physician is throughput, referring to the movement of patients through the hospital from time of admission to discharge, and coordinating that care with other disciplines that make up a patient’ s care team.
Coordinating a hospitalized patient’ s care is not easy, nor is it straightforward. Managing a patient’ s acute condition in the setting of his or her comorbidities, while keeping the patient safe from hospital acquired conditions, while navigating their social determinants of health, and doing it all in the acceptable length of stay as determined by the patient’ s insurance company! This can leave the best hospitalist frustrated( and irritable, but we hide that part).
Coordinating a patient’ s care is not a one-person job, as evident by the multiple people from various departments that visit patients each day. For patients, having multiple people come in and out of their room can be daunting, especially when each team member provides information related to the care. This experience has even become a focus of the HCAHPS( Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) survey that most hospital patients receive post-discharge about their hospital stay and is a measurement of a patient’ s satisfaction with his or her care. Aside from asking if the doctors and nurses listened to and treated the patient with courtesy and respect, the survey also asks how well the doctors, nurses and other hospital staff were informed and up to date about a patient’ s care and how well they worked together in caring for that patient( Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, 2024).
One tool to help navigate the challenge of coordinating the care of the hospitalized patient is through multi-disciplinary rounds( MDRs), also called interdisciplinary rounds( IDRs). For some, MDRs may invoke
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