#TIMELY COMMUNICATION CTMR TOOL HOSPITAL PROFESSIONAL#

They can also provide flexibility, permitting physicians to create a “living” document that can be edited over the course of stay and finalized at the point of patient transfer, effectively facilitating clinical workflow in complex settings. Structured templates can facilitate completeness of important patient information as well as substantiate and prompt verbal communication between health care providers at the point of care. The advancements of clinical information systems (CISs) and integrated electronic medical records (EMRs) provide a prime opportunity to optimize text-based communication.

While quick for the clinician to prepare, traditional methods like dictation or handwritten notes in the patient chart have been associated with inaccurate, incomplete, and lengthy delays in communication, particularly in comparison to transfer summaries prepared using electronic standardized tools. However, their value can be limited by the very methods used to produce the document. Standardized transfer protocols that structure documentation are integral for preventing failures in patient care due to incomplete and delayed exchange of information. As such, the transfer summary should be easily accessible to inpatient and outpatient health care providers as part of the patient’s permanent health care record. Complete and timely exchanges of patient care information during transitions in care are critical, not only for immediate continuity of care but also for efficient coordination of future care. The transfer summary is intended to support verbal communication between transferring and accepting medical teams and should provide sufficient detail to serve as a stand-alone communication. Īn ICU transfer summary is a clinical document that ICU physicians and nurse practitioners (NPs) often prepare to describe a patient’s stay in the ICU, including active and resolved health issues and the current care plan. Suboptimal communication during transitions can have profound implications for patients, families, and the health care system, including increased risk of preventable medical errors, adverse events, redundant testing, readmissions, and dissatisfaction with the quality of care. The movement of patients between units requires a high degree of collaboration, with verbal and written communication between health care providers as well as patients and families.

#TIMELY COMMUNICATION CTMR TOOL HOSPITAL PROFESSIONAL#

The transfer of critically ill patients from the intensive care unit (ICU) to another patient care unit (PCU) is a particularly vulnerable period in patient care, due to the high acuity of patients as well as the number of health care providers involved and their professional diversity. The primary outcome will be compared within each hospital pre- and postimplementation using separate logistic regression models for each hospital, with adjustment for patient characteristics.Ĭomplete and timely communication between health care providers is integral to seamless transitions in care. We will use descriptive statistics (ie, medians and means) to describe demographic characteristics. Secondary measures will include overall completeness, timeliness, and provider ratings of transfer summaries hospital and ICU lengths of stay and post-ICU patient outcomes, including ICU readmission, adverse events, cardiac arrest, rapid response team activation, and mortality. The primary outcome will be a binary composite measure of the timeliness and completeness of transfer summaries. We will compare transfer summaries randomly sampled over 6 months postimplementation to summaries randomly sampled over 6 months preimplementation. Implementation at each site was facilitated with user education, point-of-care support, and audit and feedback. Hospitals (ie, clusters) were allocated randomly to cross over every 2 months from control (ie, dictation only) to intervention (ie, e-transfer tool). This study is a cluster-specific pre-post trial, with randomized and staggered implementation of the e-transfer tool in four hospitals in Calgary, Alberta.

Timely communication ctmr tool hospital