Automated Versus Conventional Hospital Discharge Summaries and Prescriptions

Patient Discharge Clinical Trial

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

Status Completed

Clinical Trial 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.

Clinical Trial 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. ;

Study Design

Allocation: Randomized, Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment, Masking: Open Label, Primary Purpose: Health Services Research

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

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

• NCT number: NCT00670865
• Study type: Interventional
• Source: St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto
• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: May 2008
• Completion date: July 2008