This commentary discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on patients with non-COVID-related disease and the implications for usual standards of care, access to services, handling elective procedures, the need to protect caregivers and preserve critical healthcare resources.

Breakdowns in communication and teamwork are common contributors to adverse events and can compromise safety. As medical care becomes more complex, more teams and subspecialists are involved in a patient's care, which may lead to fragmentation of care and a lack of clear ownership. This three-part series on teamwork highlights the challenges surrounding interprofessional communication and collaboration in today's health care environment, with an emphasis on the resultant adverse effects for patients. The first commentary describes a scenario in which many consultants were carefully considering a patient's case but were not communicating effectively with one another. The second commentary underscores how psychological safety can facilitate improved collaboration and error disclosure among teams. In the third part of the series, the author points out that although the practice of medicine is highly dependent on effective teamwork, medical culture continues to emphasize and even heroize the individual to its own detriment. The author suggests that further research is necessary to achieve optimal teamwork in medicine. A PSNet interview discussed the importance of leadership and teamwork in health care.

This study found that electronic health record documentation of patients' preferences for advance care planning was incomplete. Only half of participants had documented preferences available, and the documentation was often difficult to locate and interpret. The authors conclude that electronic health records should be designed to better capture patients' preferences.

Discussing the various unintended consequences related to the mandate to implement electronic health record systems, this commentary reviews how complacency about EHR usability problems, focus on billing efficiency rather than clinical workflow, and insufficient engagement with clinicians in EHR design hinder the potential for these systems to reliably contribute to safe care.

This commentary explores challenges to monitoring and rating surgeon performance and discusses current strategies to enhance transparency on surgical care quality, such as the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program, the Surgeon Scorecard, and private assessment initiatives.

This observational study sought to determine whether the ACGME 2011 duty hour reforms led to changes in 30-day mortality or readmissions for several medical diagnoses—acute myocardial infarction, stroke, acute gastrointestinal bleed, or congestive heart failure—and for general, orthopedic, or vascular surgery. The authors examined how hospital teaching status, which they defined using resident-to-bed ratio, affected outcomes for these conditions. This measure provides insight into the intensity of teaching at a given institution rather than defining each hospital as teaching versus nonteaching. During the study time period, although readmissions and mortality both declined overall, this decrease did not differ based on teaching status, suggesting that the improvement in readmissions and 30-day mortality is not attributable to duty hour reform. These results are consistent with prior work following the 2003 duty hour reforms which has failed to demonstrate benefit to patient outcomes from costly duty hour reforms. An editorial discussing this work and a companion study urge flexibility in duty hours for physicians in training.

This commentary discusses resident work hour reform and recommends that health care generate research to understand the effects of such reductions.