Q-rounds: Making Multi-Disciplinary Family Centered Rounds and Achievable Standard of Care through Novel Virtual Rounding Features

Involving the nurse, patient and their family together during inpatient hospital rounds – a process known as multidisciplinary family centered rounding – is a best practice, yet rarely occurs. While it is well established that involving family in rounds leads to improved outcomes including decreased harmful medical errors, increased shared decision-making, and improvements in nurse and patient satisfaction, the inability for nurses and families to know when rounds will occur, makes getting everyone in the same room at the necessary time challenging. This fragmented care leads to medical errors, with miscommunication cited as the number one root cause of serious safety events and medical malpractice claims in the United States. To address these communication and coordinated challenges, Q-rounds built the first virtual rounding queue software that provides real-time updates to nurses, patients, and their families of when to expect the doctors for rounds and gives families who cannot be there in person an opportunity to RSVP to join remotely when it is their turn. In a Phase I Equivalent study, Q-rounds was shown to improve the hospital rounding experience for doctors, nurses, patients, and their families by getting all the stakeholders in the room together for the most important part of a hospital day with thousands of families joining rounds remotely since going to market in 2023. This proposal builds upon that foundation by developing innovative features to further improve communication, scheduling, and participation in rounds. These enhancements are designed to increase the reliability, efficiency, ability for families to participate in rounds through digital innovation. Successful completion of these aims will help ensure that critical updates, clinical discussions, and nurse and family input are better coordinated and consistently delivered across the care team. While it is well established that having patient’s family participate in hospital rounds leads to improved outcomes including decreased medical errors, increased shared decision-making, and improvements in patient satisfaction, without the ability to know when rounds will occur, families must often choose to wait at the bedside for hours hoping to be present, or miss rounds entirely. This Direct-to-Phase II proposal aims to improve the reliability and efficiency of inpatient hospital rounds by providing real-time notifications to families and nurses about rounding schedules and offering secure remote participation options, including streamlined interpreter integration when needed. The proposed enhancements to the Q-rounds platform will strengthen coordination between families and care teams, improve communication workflows, and support broader operational efficiency for hospitals. These improvements also help reduce staff stress and support clinician well-being by creating more predictable rounding environments where everyone who needs to be in the room for rounds to occur is reliably able to do so. By making it easier for families to engage meaningfully in their loved one’s care, Q-rounds promotes high-quality, patient-centered care through the use of scalable digital tools.