Changes Made to Orders Placed by Overnight Admitting Residents on Teaching Rounds the Next Day

Increased focus on health care quality and safety has generally led to additional resident supervision by attending physicians. At our children's hospital, residents place orders overnight that are not explicitly reviewed by attending physicians until morning rounds. We aimed to categorize the types of orders that are added or discontinued on morning rounds the morning after admission to a resident team and to understand the rationale for these order additions and discontinuations.

We used our hospital's data warehouse to generate a report of orders placed by residents overnight that were discontinued the next morning and orders that were added on rounds the morning after admission to a resident team from July 1, 2017 to June 29, 2018. Retrospective chart review was performed on included orders to determine the reason for order changes.

Our report identified 5927 orders; 538 were included for analysis after exclusion of duplicate orders, administrative orders, and orders for patients admitted to non-Pediatric Hospital Medicine services. The reason for order discontinuation or addition was medical decision-making (n = 357, 66.4%), change in patient trajectory (n = 151, 28.1%), and medical error (n = 30, 5.6%). Medical errors were most commonly related to medications (n = 24, 80%) and errors of omission (n = 19, 63%).

New or discontinued orders commonly resulted from evolving patient management decisions or changes in patient trajectory; medical errors represented a small subset of identified orders. Medical errors were often errors of omission, suggesting an area to direct future safety initiatives.