Effect of Bedside Patient Case Presentation Compared to Outside the Room Case Presentation on Patient Perception of Quality of Care and Patient Outcomes: a Randomized-controlled, Multicenter Trial

Patient-centered care may be defined as "providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions". Involving patients in all steps of the healthcare process is thus important. Yet, best presentation of patients' cases during ward rounds remains unknown. During outside the room patient case presentation, the medical team discusses difficult patient or medical issues in the team, and later presents a "patient-friendly" synthesis to the patient. Bedside patient case presentation, on the other hand, allows a patient to be part of the whole team discussion. Yet, there is concern that patients may be unable to cope with the magnitude of medical information and misunderstandings may occur. Currently, there is equipoise regarding both possibilities of patient case presentation with an important lack of trial data. We thus aim to compare the effect of bedside patient case presentation with outside the room patient case presentation during ward rounds ("Chefarztvisite") on different patient- and physician-related endpoints.

Therefore, this randomized controlled trial aims to test the hypothesis that outside the room patient case presentation compared to bedside patient case presentation results in better outcomes across different dimensions including patient understanding and perception of quality of care as well as patient outcomes, physicians' preferences, perception of quality and effectiveness, and timing of the ward rounds, respectively.