NCT00670865

Automated Versus Conventional Hospital Discharge Summaries and Prescriptions

Automated Versus Conventional Hospital Discharge Summaries and Prescriptions: A Randomized Controlled Trial

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 209 (actual)
• Sponsor: Unity Health Toronto · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: —
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

The purpose of this study is to determine whether a semi-automated electronic patient discharge summary program leads to increased community physician and housestaff satisfaction and patient outcomes as compared to conventional discharge reports.

Detailed description

For patients hospitalized with an acute illness, the days following discharge constitute a critical period. Patients must adjust to changes in their medications, follow up with family doctors and other specialists and know what symptoms should prompt a return to hospital. The community physicians who follow them rely on information from their hospitalization to facilitate this transition, and provide continuity of care. Communication between hospital and community physicians is essential to this process, and has traditionally been accomplished by a dictated discharge summary. Previous studies have shown that while dictated discharge summaries can be inaccurate, incomplete, or untimely, computer generated summaries are produced more quickly and accurately. Moreover, database-generated discharge summaries are preferred by physicians in the community. We have designed a web-based computer program with quality assurance features that automatically generates timely discharge summaries. We aim to study this program over a 2 month period on our general medicine unit by means of a randomized controlled trial. Our hypothesis is that community physicians will prefer the computer generated summaries, over the standard dictated summaries. If effective, our system could be implemented more widely, and would stand to improve communication with community physicians, continuity of care, and patient safety.

Conditions

• Patient Discharge
• Continuity of Patient Care
• Medical Records Systems, Computerized
• Hospital Information Systems

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Electronic discharge summary system	The customized electronic discharge summary program will be used to generate patient discharge summaries.

Timeline

• Start date: 2008-05-01
• Primary completion: 2008-06-01
• Completion: 2008-07-01
• First posted: 2008-05-02
• Last updated: 2010-04-16

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Canada