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Project to Integrate Spanish Interpreters

A team of internal medicine residents CJ Mowry, MD, Emily Anderson, MD, Anthony Nguyen, MD, Daniel Galvan, MD, and Sarah Lentz, MD took home the win at the 8th Annual CU Department of Medicine Shark Tank Competition.

Their project proposes integrating in-person Spanish-language interpreters into teaching rounds at Denver Health to improve communication, enhance patient care, and reduce reliance on virtual interpreters. With 25 to 30 percent of internal medicine patients at Denver Health being Spanish-speaking, the team aims to create a more efficient and equitable care experience for both patients and providers.

The competition spotlights faculty and trainee-led projects that improve clinical care and reduce healthcare costs.

Read more about their project .

Geriatrics Consultation Service in the Emergency Department - Katherine Runkel, MD and Sarah Tietz, MD

It is well documented that older adults are at high risk of delirium when hospitalized, which is associated with high morbidity and mortality. This project attempts to fill a care gap in geriatrics care where admissions could potentially be avoided. The primary impact of this effort will be reducing hospital admissions and ED visits. The team worked with ED analysts to build an alert for geriatricians when a Seniors' Clinic patient visits the ED, which triggers a consult. The aim of this consult is to discuss goals of care and determine if discharge is an option instead of admission.  As of March 2024, the team has consulted over 200 patients with 10 avoided admissions.  Additionally, they have increased clinic access to allow these patients to be seen urgently by their primary care physician.

Vaccine Optimization for Patients on or Starting Immunosuppressive Therapy - Jose Henao-Cordero, MD and Elizabeth Matthews, MD

VECTORS: Vancomycin Errors Corrected Through Optimizing OPAT Med Reconciliation and AVS Standardization -  Lorna Allen, FNP-C

This project aims to standardize discharge practices for patients receiving IV Vancomycin with the goal to eventually apply this new workflow to all OPAT discharges. Root cause analysis shows that the current multidisciplinary workflow creates multiple opportunities for inefficiency and inaccuracies. To streamline the discharge process, we will create an OPAT-specific note template in Epic where orders would be placed by the ID service and could be easily referenced by all other teams. This note will be pulled onto the AVS using a smartlink, negating the need for primary teams to transcribe medication orders and would also be routable to the outpatient ID clinic. We will take a targeted approach with the initial rollout of this new workflow, which would identify primary teams with the highest volume of patients discharging on IV Vancomycin and teams with the most frequent inaccuracies or omissions. We will also target education towards providers that are most likely to be responsible for the d/c med list (APPs, Fellows, etc).