Exploring emergency physician-hospitalist handoff interactions: development of the Handoff Communication Assessment

Ann Emerg Med. 2010 Feb;55(2):161-70. doi: 10.1016/j.annemergmed.2009.09.021. Epub 2009 Nov 27.

Abstract

Study objective: We develop and evaluate the Handoff Communication Assessment, using actual handoffs of patient transfers from emergency department to inpatient care.

Methods: This was an observational qualitative study. We derived a Handoff Communication Assessment tool, using categories from discourse coding described in physician-patient communication, previous handoff research in medicine, health communication, and health systems engineering and pilot data from 3 physician-hospitalist handoffs. The resulting tool consists of 2 typologies, content and language form. We applied the tool to a convenience sample of 15 emergency physician-to-hospitalist handoffs occurring at a community teaching hospital. Using discourse analysis, we assigned utterances into categories and determined the frequency of utterances in each category and by physician role.

Results: The tool contains 11 content categories reflecting topics of patient presentation, assessment, and professional environment and 11 language form categories representing information-seeking, information-giving, and information-verifying behaviors. The Handoff Communication Assessment showed good interrater reliability for content (kappa=0.71) and language form (kappa=0.84). We analyzed 742 utterances, which provided the following preliminary findings: emergency physicians talked more during handoffs (67.7% of all utterances) compared with hospitalists (32.3% of all utterances). Content focused on patient presentation (43.6%), professional environment (36%), and assessment (20.3%). Form was mostly information-giving (90.7%) with periodic information-seeking utterances (8.8%) and rarely information-verifying utterances (0.4%). Questions accounted for less than 10% of all utterances.

Conclusion: We were able to develop and use the Handoff Communication Assessment to analyze content and structure of handoff communication between emergency physicians and hospitalists at a single center. In this preliminary application of the tool, we found that emergency physician-to-hospitalist handoffs primarily consist of information giving and are not geared toward question-and-answer events. This critical exchange may benefit from ongoing analysis and reformulation.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Communication
  • Continuity of Patient Care
  • Emergency Medicine
  • Emergency Service, Hospital*
  • Hospitalists
  • Humans
  • Interprofessional Relations*
  • Middle Aged
  • Observer Variation
  • Patient Transfer*
  • Pilot Projects
  • Process Assessment, Health Care / methods*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Sociometric Techniques*
  • Telephone
  • United States
  • Verbal Behavior