How to learn about a hospital stay before your patient's follow-up
Ask about hospital stays the day before, request the discharge summary on a yes, and reconcile the medication list before you prescribe.
Co-founder, JotPsych
Your 2:00 is a medication follow-up. Since the last visit, your patient spent days in a hospital, and your chart doesn't say so. Ask your patient the day before. You'll know about the stay before you walk in.
Have you been in a hospital or emergency room since your last visit?
Yes No
If yes: which hospital, and on what dates?
If yes: please have your discharge papers at the visit.
Suggested wording for a behavioral health practice. A yes gives you a day to request the discharge summary.
Four steps for each follow-up
- Ask about hospital stays the day before each follow-up. Use one question: "Have you been in a hospital or emergency room since your last visit?" Put the question on a form patients get the day before, or have your front desk ask it by phone. On a yes, ask which hospital and the dates.
- Request the discharge summary the day your patient answers yes. Don't wait for the hospital. In a 2007 JAMA review, 55 observational studies tracked discharge records. In those studies, the hospital's discharge summary had reached the primary care doctor by the first visit after a discharge in 12 to 34 percent of cases.
- Ask your patient to have the discharge papers at the visit. The review's 18 controlled studies tested ways to move records faster. Records arrived sooner when patients carried them.
- Reconcile the medication list before you prescribe. Ask what the hospital started, stopped, or changed, and check each answer against the discharge summary and the pharmacy fill history.
Hospital stay: hospital name, admission and discharge dates
Discharge summary: requested date, received date
Discharge papers: reviewed with the patient
Medications: checked against the summary and the pharmacy fill history
Suggested wording for the interval history in the first note after a hospital stay. The entry records which sources you checked before you prescribed.
Brittney Anderson, a family physician who owns her practice, learned of one patient's eight-day hospital stay in the exam room. She had no records. "It just burned me up to be in a room, talking to a patient, thinking that they're just here for this thing," she said.
Now her team reviews every patient on the day's schedule before clinic and asks what happened since the last visit. Your day-before question gets you that answer a day sooner.
After a psychiatric stay, your patient's suicide risk runs highest in the first months. In a 2017 JAMA Psychiatry review of 100 studies, the suicide rate in the first three months after discharge was about 100 times the global rate.
In JotPsych, your follow-up appointment type can send a form with the hospital question a day before each visit.
See JotPsych- Brittney Anderson, MD, “The Morning Huddle Reimagined,” session A1, Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) 2026 Annual Conference, San Antonio, September 28, 2026.
- Sunil Kripalani and colleagues, “Deficits in Communication and Information Transfer Between Hospital-Based and Primary Care Physicians,” JAMA 297, no. 8 (2007): 831 to 841. Abstract read on PubMed (PMID 17327525), October 2, 2026.
- Daniel Thomas Chung and colleagues, “Suicide Rates After Discharge From Psychiatric Facilities: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” JAMA Psychiatry 74, no. 7 (2017): 694 to 702. Key Points read in PubMed Central (PMC5710249), October 2, 2026.