Handoffs in Radiology: Minimizing Communication Errors and Improving Care Transitions
Handoffs are essential to achieving safe care transitions. In radiology practice, frequent transitions of care responsibility among clinicians, radiologists, and patients occur between moments of care such as determining protocol, imaging, interpreting, and consulting. Continuity of care is maintain...
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Published in | Journal of the American College of Radiology Vol. 18; no. 9; pp. 1297 - 1309 |
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Main Authors | , , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
United States
Elsevier Inc
01.09.2021
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Handoffs are essential to achieving safe care transitions. In radiology practice, frequent transitions of care responsibility among clinicians, radiologists, and patients occur between moments of care such as determining protocol, imaging, interpreting, and consulting. Continuity of care is maintained across these transitions with handoffs, which are the process of communicating patient information and transferring decision-making responsibility. As a leading cause of medical error, handoffs are a major communication challenge that is exceedingly common in both diagnostic and interventional radiology practice. The frequency of handoffs in radiology underscores the importance of using evidence-based strategies to improve patient safety in the radiology department. In this article, reliability science principles and handoff improvement tools are adapted to provide radiology-focused strategies at individual, team, and organizational levels with the goal of minimizing handoff errors and improving care transitions. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 1546-1440 1558-349X |
DOI: | 10.1016/j.jacr.2021.04.007 |