Work

An analysis of team checklists in physician signout notes.

Year: 2010

Type: article

Abstract: Teams of physicians in the hospital collaboratively maintain checklists in informal "signout" documents to help organize, manage, and hand off critical patient-based tasks. We created an application within our commercial EHR that supports basic management of these checklists at two urban, academic medical centers. We collected and analyzed over 400,000 checklist tasks created in the application. We calculated the frequencies of terms and term-combinations (n-grams) in these lists, and compared these data with a previously described clinical task model. Our findings provide evidence for the generalizability of the original clinical task model, and provide the foundation for a more sophisticated physician checklist utility. This could contribute to improved efficiency and safety in patient care.

Source: PubMed Central

Authors: Daniel M Stein, David K Vawdrey, Peter D Stetson, Suzanne Bakken

Institution: Columbia University

Language: English

Topic: Hospital Admissions and Outcomes

Subfield: Emergency Medicine

Field: Medicine

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funder: U.S. National Library of Medicine

Award: Automated Detection of Medical Errors