Improving Hospital-wide Inpatient I-PASS Handoff

Abstract

In line with The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization (JCAHO) as well as The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s (ACGME) priorities for accreditation, our institution identified handoffs as an essential factor to consider in preventing risk to patients and process failure. Effective communication between caregivers can help reduce medical inpatient errors and preventable deaths due to miscommunication. Our electronic medical record system, EPIC, includes I-PASS handoff. I-PASS is one of the standardized tools for handoffs. This mnemonic stands for Illness severity, Patient summary, Action list, Situation awareness, and Synthesis by the receiver. This QI project's primary objective was to improve the hospital-wide inpatient I-PASS handoff rate from 40% to 65% within two months following the interventions and improve provider satisfaction in using I-PASS handoffs in EPIC. Interventions included: education, tool modification, team meetings, and improving provider satisfaction in the use of I-PASS handoffs in EPIC. After our interventions, our results showed an increase in user satisfaction in the use of I-PASS. Our I-PASS percentage of handoffs also showed an increase from 40% to 50%, two months after implementation. There was also a notable improvement in the percentage of handoff numbers for both the surgical and medical side. The team also learned that we needed more buy-in from the institution’s leaders for this QI project to be more successful.