Programs Reduce Hospital-to-Primary Care Handoff Complications

Programs to improve patient handoffs from the hospital to primary care are often complex and involve multiple interventions that affect various outcome measures, which makes it difficult to determine the value of each individual intervention, concludes a study published in the September 18, 2012, Annals of Internal Medicine. The researchers performed a literature review of 36 studies that aimed to improve patient handoffs from hospital to primary care at discharge and found no strong evidence that a single intervention is regularly associated with positive effects on a specific outcome measure. Of the 36 studies examined, 34 described multicomponent interventions and 25 had statistically significant effects in favor of the intervention group in at least one outcome measure.