If you’ve ever stayed overnight in a hospital, you’ve probably experienced something called pre-rounding — even if you didn’t know the name for it.
Before the care team knocks on your door, they huddle outside. They check your chart. They scan your overnight vitals. They glance at notes from the nurses who cared for you while you slept. By the time they step inside, they already know how you did last night. They’re ready with the right questions — or the right reassurance.
That simple act — pre-rounding — can make you feel like more than a room number. You feel seen.
Pre-rounding isn’t fancy. It’s not the latest app or AI tool. It’s just a commitment to show up prepared — and the data shows it works.
Better Patient Experience:
When care teams pre-round, patients feel heard and understood. Pre-rounding directly improves patient satisfaction scores and trust, making them feel more informed, heard and included;they feel more prepared, less anxious.
Fewer Missed Details:
Breakdowns in communication - especially during patient handoffs - are one of the top causes of serious patient safety events, contributing to 20-70% of root causes depending on event type. Pre-rounding and team huddles help to close these gaps, catching small but critical changes before they escalate.
Safer, More Aligned Care:
When nurses, physicians, and specialists share updates — and patients have a clear moment to add what’s changed — everyone stays aligned. Small but critical details don’t get missed, which means fewer preventable errors and a more connected experience for the patient.
Outside hospital walls, that mindset often disappears.
In outpatient care, patients arrive hoping they remember every question they meant to ask. They pull out dog-eared folders of old results or try to log into a portal in the waiting room. Meanwhile, the clinician is juggling chart notes, hunting for missing data, maybe still thinking about the last patient.
So much of the visit is spent piecing together what could’ve been known ahead of time — if only we were all a little more prepared.
At Alcott, we believe every visit should feel like your care team has already pre-rounded.
That doesn’t mean more paperwork for patients or more after-hours “pajama time” for clinicians. It means giving everyone a simple way to share and review what matters most before they’re face-to-face.
It means a parent doesn’t have to remember every detail about their child’s medications. A patient managing multiple conditions doesn’t have to log into six different portals at 2 a.m. And a clinician doesn’t have to hope they catch a critical detail buried three tabs deep.
Preparation is the foundation for trust.
When both sides come ready — the patient with their story, the clinician with the full picture — the visit becomes what it was always meant to be: human, connected, and focused on what actually matters.
Pre-rounding works in hospitals because it’s about more than a checklist. It’s about showing up with care. We think that same spirit belongs in every visit, every time.
At Alcott, we’re on a mission to bring pre-rounding care to every visit — not just inpatient rounds, but your primary care check-in, your specialist consult, and your telehealth follow-up.
Because the best visit starts before the door ever closes.