Study: Automating data entry improves care transitions

Errors in communication during handoffs are a potential source of medical errors and risk to patients. To reduce the number of errors in communication, an early adopter of the I-PASS handoff bundle created an electronic tool to incorporate user-generated patient information with automatically compiled electronic health record data. The objective of this observational quality improvement study, which appeared in the September/October Journal for Healthcare Quality, was to determine whether partial automation would decrease communication errors during care transitions. Six inpatient internal medicine teams replaced manual generation of handoff documents with the new system in two separate four-month trials and reduced the risk of introducing errors in handoff documents by 46.6%.