Hospitals are more focused on quality and patient safety, and patient handoffs are no longer a one-time event.

Health care professionals are now contemplating more sophisticated handoff scenarios, rather than just moving shifts and transferring a patient from one portion of the hospital to another.

Quality leaders are still on the lookout for new ways to improve handoffs, and they need them.

As a result, hospitals are starting to make follow-up phone calls to patients who are more than likely to return.

Amongst available solutions out there, no one is like the effectiveness of the CareAlign solution.

CareAlign Solution

Physicians can use CareAlign to manage their clinical activities. All of the information a patient’s care team requires is available at any time, on any device, and from any place. A unique emphasis on the patient’s health and well-being is at the center of CareAlign’s approach.

CareAlign was designed from the bottom up by and for clinicians as a  Patient Handoff Tool for doctors. We believe that usability and accessibility improve patient safety as well as caregiver well-being. By using CareAlign, you could improve the patient care quality more exponentially by doing these:

Having the patients in time

Those who return to the hospital after a three-week absence are also contacted by the hospital. The patient’s health improves as the patient’s anxiety and desire to be well lessen.

Inquire about their health care adjustments after they were released on day 21.

As patients become more involved in their own treatment, patient handoffs are becoming more active. The goal of healthcare facilities is to provide patients with the knowledge, motivation, and competence to take care of themselves.

Healthcare providers, according to experts, should provide progressively little quantities of information to patients who are not as involved in their own treatment on a more frequent basis. They will grow even more removed from reality if you offer them with an overwhelming amount of information.

Convey the right message

CareAlign encourages doctors and nurses to use patient handovers instead of patient handoffs. People sometimes mistake “handoff” and “handover,” supposing that doctors are abandoning their patients and ceasing to care for them.

A handoff means I’m relinquishing power over you. There is a continuum of care when someone “passes over” someone else’s care to someone else. I’m still worried about you and one of your medical support group members. It doesn’t mean I don’t care about you or have any duty to look after you just because you aren’t in my bed.

She believes they are still under their long-term care, despite the fact that they are no longer in their physical care. A person in charge of a patient’s care may seek information or support from the person who is giving them over.

Combining multiple methods with CareAlign

Instead than focusing on the point at which a patient is passed from one caregiver to another, improved patient handoffs should include the complete care process.

Caregivers can use the acronym I-PASS to ensure they address the following topics while handing over information: the patient’s severity; their summary; their action list; their situational awareness; and their synthesis.

I-PASS was created, according to the expert, to shorten the amount of time residents worked, resulting in more patient handoffs.

When it came to patient handoffs, all of the professionals had a similar approach. To improve handoffs, a range of tactics were used, including the use of a computerized tool and cooperative training. During this endeavor, the I-PASS mnemonic was used to help establish a better verbal approach. We have created a handoff tool that encourages better practices.

The handsoff practice

For more than a decade, the safety literature has worked to standardize provider handoff procedures. Clinicians received thorough instruction on how to use the SBAR and ANTICipate software to transfer care. Additionally, computer and internet-based technologies were utilized. On the other hand, the background, clinical outcomes, and other events that did not proceed as intended were not extensively probed. Starmer and colleagues published a seminal research in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2014.

Symptoms, a patient description, a task list, knowledge of the current situation and contingency planning, and synthesis or read-back are all capabilities of this instrument. In early 2014, the researchers published a preliminary report on the I-PASS instrument and its accompanying curriculum. Earlier this year, the same researchers published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine linking I-PASS to fewer errors.

Nine pediatric residency schools have agreed on techniques and processes for oral and written signout. The project was planned thoroughly. It was a sensible idea to involve the facility’s primary users (residents) in process and workflow adjustments. Active surveillance was employed in over 10,000 hospitalizations to search for medical errors and things that may have been done to prevent them. They observed a 23% reduction in medical errors and a 30% reduction in preventable adverse events prior to and following the intervention. Computer time, resident work, and oral handoffs all remained steady. This section contains best practices that may be used and evaluated in a variety of situations.

A 2014 research defined “morning carryover” as patients who are admitted to a hospital overnight and then transferred to another provider the following day. The ACGME’s resident duty hours standards have increased the number of handoffs in teaching hospitals, increasing the risk of harm. Dr. Devlin and colleagues noticed that while on-call trainees missed 40% of clinically significant abnormalities at the morning handover, they recorded just 86 percent of such problems in their medical records. If each patient was assessed in a specific region each morning, this information was more likely to be passed on. As with the I-PASS research, this study should inspire individuals to rethink their interactions with persons who arrive late in the morning.

Improving handoff with CareAlign

Hospitals should adopt methods to reduce medical and medication errors, according to the World Health Organization and the American College of Healthcare Executives. Most teaching hospitals’ handoff protocols are not standardized, according to a Joint Commission study.

The accrediting organization gave specific suggestions for improving the handoff process.

• Make sure that handoffs are exact and thorough. According to the Joint Commission, hospital handover plans should include any information that has to be passed on to the next level of care. This data is used to set expectations, workflow tools, and training for healthcare staff.
• Make a set of procedures and rules that everyone may follow. To standardize the handover process, hospitals should establish tools and strategies. According to the Joint Commission, there are numerous methods for improving compliance.
• Make a case for the necessity of face-to-face engagement. Clinicians are encouraged to meet with patients and their families face to face so that crucial information may be presented without interruption, according to the recommendation.
• Utilize technology to its full potential. It’s worth emphasizing that the Joint Commission advises against standardizing handoff methods only through electronic health records (EHRs), websites, or text messaging.

Reach out CareAlign now for further information about the chance in improving handoff patient.