Hospitals in pursuit of excellence

Optimizing Patient Handoffs

For the past three years, New York Medical College at Westchester Medical Center has been developing handoff best practices, making use of both conventional methods (face-to-face sign-outs where interruptions are minimized and standardized computer sign-out forms), as well as more novel methods such as faculty oversight of house staff sign-out and utilization of a handheld application-the Patient Documentation Transfer System, which generates prioritized patient lists and "to-do" sets. In addition, a physician events reporting module built into the handoff software encourages house officers to report near miss and adverse events while on call to permit rapid systems changes.