Background: Delays in the discharge process of hospitalized patients impact patient flow and lead to increased costs and slower progression of care. As hospitalist work becomes increasingly shift based, there are concerns for proper patient handoffs and hesitancy with clinical progression of care overnight. This leads to daytime patient flow congestion and is a significant [...]

Background: Delays in the discharge process of hospitalized patients impact patient flow and lead to increased costs and slower progression of care. As hospitalist work becomes increasingly shift based, there are concerns for proper patient handoffs and hesitancy with clinical progression of care overnight. This leads to daytime patient flow congestion and is a significant [...]

Background: Despite the current focus on developing handoff training curricula to improve patient safety, rigorous assessments of handoffs remain scarce. Immersive simulations allow for the evaluation of communication skills, but few specifically account for common external threats to effective handoff performance. Our aim was to investigate the effects of these interruptions in an educational handoff [...]

Background: Day-to-night inpatient handoff is a high-risk moment, with potential for miscommunication. A novel handoff program recently reduced medical errors and preventable adverse events. Historically, handoffs performed by Internal Medicine residents at our institution were not standardized and there was little workplace-based performance feedback. We evaluated the impact of a novel standardized handoff tool and [...]

Background: Failures in communication among healthcare personnel are known threats to patient safety. Communication is particularly vulnerable to error when patient care responsibility is transferred from one provider to another (i.e., handoff). In this study we implemented a web-based handoff tool and provider training, and evaluated the impact on preventable adverse events (AEs). Methods: We [...]