Importance: The transfer of patients between hospitals (interhospital transfer, IHT), exposes patients to communication errors and gaps in information exchange.
Objective: To design and implement a standardised accept note to improve communication during medical service transfers, and evaluate its impact on patient outcomes.
Design: Prospective interventional cohort study.
Setting: A 792-bed tertiary care hospital.
Participants: All patient transfers from any acute care hospital to the general medicine, cardiology, oncology and intensive care unit (ICU) services between August 2020 and June 2022.
Interventions: A standardised accept note template was developed over a 9-month period with key stakeholder input and embedded in the electronic health record, completed by nurses within the hospital's Access Centre.
Main outcomes and measures: Primary outcome was clinician-reported medical errors collected via surveys of admitting clinicians within 72 hours after IHT patient admission. Secondary outcomes included clinician-reported failures in communication; presence and 'timeliness' of accept note documentation; patient length of stay (LOS) after transfer; rapid response or ICU transfer within 24 hours and in-hospital mortality. All outcomes were analysed postintervention versus preintervention, adjusting for patient demographics, diagnosis, comorbidity, illness severity, admitting service, time of year, hospital COVID census and census of admitting service and admitting team on date of admission.
Results: Of the 1004 and 654 IHT patients during preintervention and postintervention periods, surveys were collected on 735 (73.2%) and 462 (70.6%), respectively. Baseline characteristics were similar among patients in each time period and between survey responders and non-responders. Adjusted analyses demonstrated a 27% reduction in clinician-reported medical error rates postimplementation versus preimplementation (11.5 vs 15.8, adjusted OR (aOR) 0.73, 95% CI 0.53 to 0.99). Secondary outcomes demonstrated lower adjusted odds of clinician-reported failures in communication (aOR 0.88; 0.78 to 0.98) and rapid response/ICU transfer (aOR 0.57; 0.34 to 0.97), and improved presence (aOR 2.30; 1.75 to 3.02) and timeliness (-21.4 hours vs -8.7 hours, p<0.001) of accept note documentation. There were no significant differences in LOS or mortality.
Conclusions and relevance: Among 1658 medical patient transfers, implementing a standardised accept note was associated with improved presence and timeliness of accept note documentation, clinician-reported medical errors, failures in communication and clinical decline following transfer, suggesting that improving communication during IHT can improve patient outcomes.
Keywords: Communication; Hand-off; Patient safety; Quality improvement; Transitions in care.
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