“Things are made possible when knowledge is shared”
~ Dr. Miri Lader
Night Huddle
Creating space for communication when it matters most
When nurses identified feeling disconnected from the medical team overnight, I led an interdisciplinary quality-improvement initiative to redesign how nurses and residents communicated. Together, we developed a structured Night Huddle, then used iterative PDSA cycles to refine its timing, format, prompts, and workflow.
The result transformed an absent process into a sustained nightly practice, creating dedicated space for nurses and residents to clarify plans, address concerns, adjust orders, and care for patients as one team.
A visual overview of a QI initiative designed to strengthen interdisciplinary nighttime communication.
Clinical Medicine Advanced Doctoring
Transition to Residency Curriculum
The transition from medical student to resident is one of the steepest shifts in medical training, requiring graduates to move quickly from supervised learners to physicians responsible for clinical decisions, communication, workflow, and patient safety. Nationally, most Transition-to-Residency courses are brief, with a median duration of only two weeks and substantial variation in content and assessment.
I designed CMAD to be different: a required, longitudinal course spanning the entire fourth year. Across 14 sessions, students revisit core Entrustable Professional Activities while developing practical, intern-level skills in clinical reasoning, medication safety, handoffs, emergencies, procedures, documentation, communication, escalation, and systems-based practice. The goal is not simply to review knowledge before graduation, but to progressively build readiness, sound clinical judgment, and accurate self-awareness as students move toward greater independence.
A visual overview of the course’s purpose, structure, and approach to residency readiness.
Emergency Text Alerts
Recognizing that all members of a team should be included in its safety systems
Medical students spend much of their clinical years away from the university as they rotate in the teaching hospitals. Emergency alerts, however, were only being pushed to employees, effectively leaving students out of the communication loop when it came to severe weather, disaster, and active-shooter notifications. Recognizing this gap, I worked with various key stake holders to add all clinical medical students to the Dayton Children’s Hospital’s emergency text-alert system. Rather than expecting students to navigate a system built around employment status, we changed the system to recognize them as members of the clinical community.
A visual overview of this systems change that closed an unintended communication gap.