• Stephanie Berger, Lauren B Nassetta, Meghan E Hofto, Paul Scalici, and Robert F Pass.
• From the Department of Pediatrics, University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine and Children's of Alabama, Birmingham.
• South. Med. J. 2020 Dec 1; 113 (12): 635-639.

ObjectivesAssigning patients to a call team every fourth day (bolus system) caused the maldistribution of patients among resident teams and required additional faculty effort for overflow patient care. We changed to a continuous daily rotation (drip system) and examined the effect on clinical workload among resident teams, resident education, and faculty utilization.MethodsThis is a retrospective study based on the daily records of 7 am team census, the attending physician schedules for a pediatric hospital medicine service with 5 teams, and the measures of resident education, including noon conference attendance, scores on in-service examinations, and duty hour violations. Data from the bolus system (May 2014-June 2015) were compared with the drip system (May 2016-June 2017).ResultsData from 348 bolus days and 338 drip days were analyzed. There was a decrease in interteam variation from 6.2 to 3.9 patients (P < 0.001). There were fewer days with the following: large interteam variation (143 to 25, P < 0.001), days with resident teams at or above capacity (26 to 11, P = 0.01), resident teams below a minimum 7 am census (133 to 18, P < 0.001), and days when additional faculty were pulled for clinical care (61 to 9, P < 0.001). Resident noon conference attendance was unchanged and there was no adverse effect on examination scores or duty hour violations.ConclusionsChanging from a bolus to a drip model for admissions to inpatient teams resulted in a more even distribution of the workload and a more efficient use of physician resources without negatively affecting resident education.

11 keywords...

hide…