The patient hand-off brings greater chance of errors

The simple transition of a patient from one caretaker to another represents a gap that is “considered especially vulnerable to error.” As Quality and Safety in Health Care (QSHC), a publication of the British Medical Journal, noted in January, even the most common hand-off — your standard referral from primary care physician to specialist — is not risk-free. As Dr. Bob Wachter says in his blog, “in more than two-thirds of outpatient subspecialty referrals, the specialist received no information from the primary care physician to guide the consultation.”

21st Century Medicine Wrought with Miscommunication and Human Error [Via AlterNet]

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