As part of our documentation quality improvement initiative, we promote practical ways for clinicians to provide clear and actionable communication at transitions of care.
Connect Care provides a set of integrated supports that can help clinicians anticipate and plan for a patient's discharge from hospital. Designed to facilitate multidisciplinary collaboration, the Transition Planning Package improves communications within and across encounters.
Recent enhancements expand access to a common set of standardized discharge planning tools for all participating disciplines, including transition coordinators, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, recreation therapy, psychology, spiritual care, respiratory therapy, speech language pathology, dietetics and social work. Care teams can customize the planning tools to adjust which discipline "readiness" statuses are tracked. A new rich text field allows teams an easier way to capture and continually update narrative planning considerations that arise in Rapid Rounds and are helpful to track.
In addition to full access to Rapid Rounds supports, all team members can view and interact with a patient's transition plan through an inpatient chart sidebar, summary activity index and/or summary activity "patient story" display. All have been enhanced in response to user feedback.
Finally, the current and discharge target "safe handling status" (SHS, a simple measure of requirements for things like patient transfers, correlating with functional mobility required for discharge readiness) is now incorporated into Connect Care transition planning tools. A SHS column can be added to Rapid Rounds (and other) patient lists. SHS current and target status is incorporated into the integrated readiness ("traffic lights") tool as well as chart sidebar, storyboard and other planning reports.