Internal Medicine Portal: Clinical Rounding Service

Reasons to invite your Clinical Librarian to rounds or utilize services virtually:

1. Librarians support evidence-based patient centered care by being part of your multidisciplinary team at the point of decision making.

2. Librarians save time by connecting you and your team with the information you need. Speed up your day by having your clinical librarian look up research for you - they specialize in searching!

3. They can also keep you informed about the latest information resources and help you set up mobile apps to make your experience easier.

4. Studies show that clinicians have at least 1 question for every 2 patients, and only 40% of those questions are actually pursued.  With a librarian, the obstacles of locating information disappear (Del Fiol G ,et al., Clinical  questions raised by clinicians at the point of care: a systematic review. JAMA 2015).

Clinical librarianship is "point-of-care" librarianship. Clinical librarians attend noon conference, serve on hospital committees, and perform searches at the bedside (or in the hallway between patients). The librarians at WRNMMC are semi-embedded in Internal Medicine/MICU, Pediatrics, and Psychiatry.

Your Clinical Librarian is available on IM Inpatient Wards and the MICU. She is familiar with the vocabulary and most frequent clinical questions.

Your Clinical Librarian can take questions by means of email, telephone, texting, virtual conferencing, or in-person when working at the hospital. 

To best utilize services, we recommend the following:

• Figure out if you need more information to make an informed, evidence-based decision in patient care
  • If you have a need for more information, let your librarian know. She can help you formulate or focus questions when you have that nagging feeling that you "just need some more information."
  • Give your librarian context. This is especially important when the librarian is working virtually
• If you are teaching, or new to inpatient rounds, decide if you would benefit from background information
  • There are more options than up-to-date for why we do things certain ways, what a disease process looks like, or best practices for evaluation and treatment. 
  • Would you benefit from a book chapter? Similar case reports? A meta-analysis? We can send those to you and find easily digestible information to facilitate learning
• Broaden applicability
  • You may not have a pressing question for a particular patient, but you may see patterns in care/management that you want more information on. Or you may want to learn from one patients' case to be prepared for later. 
• Talk to your team!
  • Your teammates or attending may have questions related to patient care or learning, even if nothing immediately comes to mind. Often, these conversations lead to more questions being asked and more evidence unearthed, and ultimately better patient care

Your clinical librarian will strive to send you information as close to real time as possible, especially with responses same-day.