Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Electronic Medical Transfer Tool to Improve Communication During Transfers From ICU

Background: Transfers of care within hospital are vulnerable periods in health care delivery. The complete, accurate, and timely communication of essential patient information is particularly critical in transfers of care from the intensive care unit (ICU) to an inpatient ward. The ICU generally has the most vulnerable patients, the highest resource use, and most complex system of multi professional coordinated care within the hospital. Communication breakdowns between ICU and receiving inpatient medical teams can have profound implications on the quality, delivery and cost of patient care. Ineffective transfers may result in adverse events, redundant testing, increased hospital stays, and readmission to ICU or hospital.

The written transfer summary is a widely used and important means to present and prioritize patient information to healthcare providers. Unlike verbal reporting, written communication is durable and accessible to many providers at many points in time, making it a critical component in facilitating continuity of patient care. Despite known shortcomings, dictation remains standard practice in many hospitals to complete ICU medical transfer summaries. Although the optimal content and structure for transfer summaries have not been agreed upon in the scientific community, it is clear that standardization can help minimize both the incidence and impact of information gaps during transfer. Computer-enabled tools that remind and guide the user to document essential content (e.g., goals of care, medications) have been found to improve the relevance, consistency, and readability of information in transfer summaries.

Methods: This study will use a cluster-specific pre-post trial design with randomized and staggered implementation to assess the effectiveness of an electronic transfer of care tool developed in the primary clinical information system (Sunrise Clinical Manager, Eclipsys Corporation, Boca Raton, FL) by a multidisciplinary team of healthcare providers and clinical documentation specialists. Four adult medical surgical ICUs in one Canadian city will begin as control sites (i.e., no electronic medical transfer tool available) and subsequently be allocated in a random order to cross over to intervention sites (i.e., electronic medical transfer tool available) at regular intervals. Implementation intervals will be matched to medical resident rotation block dates, which occur every four weeks; a single study interval will encompass two resident blocks. Users--physicians and nurse practitioners responsible for completing ICU medical transfer summaries--will have access to the electronic medical transfer tool at intervention sites, in addition to standard dictation services. A multi-component knowledge translation (KT) strategy designed to facilitate adoption of the tool will be tailored and delivered to ICUs prior to implementation at the site. The KT strategy will encompass education, point-of-care support, and audit and feedback.

Data will be collected both prospectively and retrospectively to measure perceived (prospective user survey) and actual (retrospective chart review) quality of the transfer summaries. The primary outcome will be a binary composite measure of two transfer summary conditions, manually collected retrospectively: (1) presence of four essential information elements (goals of care designation, diagnosis, active issues on transfer, medications to continue) and (2) availability of the transfer summary to accepting clinicians at the time of patient transfer. Transfer summaries that meet these two conditions will be coded as "Present"; those that do not will be coded as "Absent". Patient clinical outcome data also will be retrospectively collected from hospital clinical information systems and paper charts. All study outcomes will be compared between baseline (pre-implementation) and intervention (post-implementation) periods for all ICUs.

Discussion: The evaluation of the electronic medical ICU transfer tool will contribute to our understanding how computer-based structured documentation can improve communication between medical teams and potentially better patient safety.