While UCI Health hasn’t documented quantitative improvements yet, use of I-PASS has been proven to reduce medical errors. If you do things in a structured way, we believe we will have better outcomes,” says Dr. What we like and why we implemented I-PASS is because it is a structured handoff. One person might write their instructions on a scrap of paper, another might do a verbal handoff. “Before every person and every department did their handoffs in different ways. S – Situation Awareness and Contingency Planning.In November 2017, they adopted the I-PASS tool and embedded it within their EMR (Figure 1).įigure 1: I-PASS is a mnemonic used to standardize HOC Through a collaboration between physicians and nurses, the hospital looked for a way they could create a handoff tool within the electronic medical record (EMR). Wilson, MD, MA, Chief Medical Officer at UCI Health. “At UCI Health (California), we have seen the need to improve hand-off communications and have been working on it in a focused way for three years,” explains Dr. When HOC information is absent, incomplete, erroneous or delayed, serious patient harm can occur. Accurate, effective and complete HOC are vital for patient safety. Hand-off communications (HOC) must occur whenever care of a patient is transferred from one individual or care team to another.
This month, we will highlight two different hospitals approach to implementing Actionable Patient Safety Solutions (APSS) Challenge #6 and optimizing Hand-off Communications. It’s estimated that 80% of serious medical errors involve miscommunication between caregivers during the transfer of patients. Two Examples of How Structured Hand-off Communication Reduces Preventable HarmĪs healthcare has evolved and become more specialized, patients are likely to encounter more handoffs than just a few generations ago. Ineffective handoffs can contribute to gaps and failures in patient safety, including medication errors, wrong-site surgery, and patient deaths.