Put a Face to a Name: A Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluating the Impact of Providing Clinician Photographs on Inpatients' Recall

Who’s My Doctor? Using an Electronic Tool to Improve Team Member Identification on an Inpatient Pediatrics Team

“…Importantly, despite the relatively few correct responses during Phase 1, almost all subjects in both phases reported that identification impacted not only their communication with the TTM, but also trust and satisfaction. Although some previous studies have used similar tools in paper, album, card, or whiteboard format and tested recall ability after tool exposure, 13,15,22 other studies have not limited tool use and have shown positive results in subjects' ability to correctly identify their physicians.…”

“…3,11,13,15 Based on previaous studies, we estimated that our baseline level of attending identification (in Phase 1) would be 20%. To detect a 25% difference in proportions with an a of 0.05 and power of 0.8, we calculated that we needed to enroll 60 subjects in each group.…”

“…10 Although there are many studies showing improvement in TTM identification with use of paper solutions such as cards/ handouts with names and photos, these print solutions may not adequately accomplish the goal of a real-time, responsive system. [11][12][13][14][15] They must be printed often due to the frequent TTM changes in teaching hospitals and require physical placement in a specific location. This process can become cumbersome and has many potential failure points.…”

A picture paints a thousand words

“…A recent study by Appel and colleagues evaluated the impact of providing inpatients with photographs of their clinical care team on their recall of the care team members and on perceived patient-provider communication (6). This study found that patients have difficulty remembering their hospital care team members, with 30% of patients being unable to recall a single clinician' s name.…”

Doctor Who? A Quality Improvement Project to Assess and Improve Patients' Knowledge of Their Inpatient Physicians

“…Examples include in-room or inhand reminders that act as visual aids for patients and have been shown to improve identification of physicians. 5,[7][8][9][10][11][12] Adoption of these interventions by physicians has been slow, potentially due to a lack of awareness among providers of the importance of patient identification, unavailability of tools, forgetting to use them, or time constraints. 5,11 We sought to determine the impact of an educational audit and feedback intervention on the use of 2 low-cost tools: business cards and white boards.…”