​Post-Handoff Reports of Outcomes
Accurate and timely diagnosis is key to avoiding patient harms from delays in appropriate therapy, exposure to ineffective treatments and unnecessary tests with potential false-positive results. In order for clinicians to be able to hone and calibrate their decision-making, they must get ongoing feedback of the outcomes of their diagnosis and treatment decisions. Frequent handoffs hinder this feedback. At the same time, we are not taking full advantage of a potential positive aspect of these handoffs--having multiple clinicians caring for a single patient provides built-in second opinions.
The PHAROS (Post-Handoff Reports of Outcomes) project aims to use the capabilities of the electronic health record to create personalized summaries that:
- enable clinicians to efficiently identify patients recently under their care
- highlight some important events and outcomes that occurred after the care of the patient was handed off to another provider
Project team: Robert El-Kareh, MD MPH MS, Samantha Hurst, PhD MA, Aaron Kemp, MS