Background: Hospitalists increasingly rely upon electronic handoff tools to communicate important patient care information. Our institution transitioned from a paper/verbal handoff process to a completely electronic system in April 2017 for day-to-night patient care handoff. In the fall of 2016, the same system had been adopted for end-of-week service change. Purpose: This study set out [...]

Background: Transitions of care are critical to maintaining patient safety and decreasing adverse events, but they remain a complex process with many pitfalls. Electronic Medical Record (EMR) based handoffs can enhance communication by centralizing content for serial handoffs between providers, facilitating real-time updates and automatically incorporating patient data elements. Over the past several years, much [...]

Background: Medical housestaff must participate in a handoff process when transitioning between rotations on hospital services. During this time, a new team of residents assumes care for multiple patients. A prior study demonstrated that this critical period of transition is associated with increased mortality among hospitalized patients. Methods of improving daily patient handoffs to overnight [...]