Background: Handoff miscommunications are a leading source of medical errors. Medical error and adverse event rates decreased following implementation of the I-PASS handoff program (a bundled intervention using a structured mnemonic, I-PASS, and other initiatives to sustain implementation) in a pediatric research trial. Whether I-PASS can be implemented in settings outside academic pediatric institutions is [...]

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: Handoff miscommunications are a leading source of medical errors. Medical error and adverse event rates decreased following implementation of the I-PASS handoff program (a bundled intervention using a structured mnemonic, I-PASS, and other initiatives to sustain implementation) in a pediatric research trial. Whether I-PASS can be implemented in settings outside academic pediatric institutions is [...]

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: Approximately 1.6 million patients are transferred between hospitals yearly, with disproportionately high cost and mortality. Despite the risk associated with inter-hospital transition of care, there is no established best practice in coordinating and triaging transfers. This gap in knowledge is partly driven by a dearth of studies which integrate clinical data before and after [...]

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: Academic medical centers with teaching and non-teaching teams and complex call schedules frequently utilize triage providers to allocate admissions to each inpatient service. In this process, the ED provider hands off the patient to a triage provider, who then hands off the patient to the admitting provider. This sequential handoff can lead to decay [...]

Background: Physician handoffs between inpatient shifts influence safety and care quality. Handoffs are also at risk for communication failures. Poor care coordination and miscommunication cause 80% of sentinel events nationwide. The rise of the electronic medical record (EMR) presented an opportunity to standardize communication during handoffs. Unfortunately, this potential has thus far gone largely unrealized, [...]

Background: To address safety risks with transitions from hospital to home, the IMPACT collaborative designed, tested and implemented the Pediatric Patient Centered Care Transition (PACT) Bundle. The bundle element “perfect” handoff (timely and complete) aimed to improve hospitalist handoff to outpatient providers at hospital discharge.Our objective was to  assess outpatient medical provider’s perceptions of hospitalists’ handoff [...]