Patient hand-off system improvement

Wellmont health system takes a proactive approach to patient safety. Wellmont sought to improve and standardize the patient hand-off process for department transfers originating in the emergency department (ED) and the post anesthesia care unit (PACU) at all four of its hospitals (a patient hand-off occurs when the responsibility for care of a patient changes from one practitioner to another). By utilizing a questionnaire, observations; networking, and existing hospital data, Wellmont Senior Design team identified the major process elements defining the patient hand-off and the most frequent cause of related incidents (an incident is defined as an inefficiency or deviation from procedure that has the potential to affect patient safety). After investigating both a manual and automated process to improve and standardize patient hand-offs, the team recommended implementing a manual checklist initially, then moving to an automated process once the desired level of process refinement has been achieved.