Before the template was introduced, what kinds of pertinent information was missing?
Physicians didnt include the names of consultants or list what procedures had been performed. Even if those details were somewhere in the discharge summary, they were lost in the body of the report. Those are elements that must be included, so when a patient comes back with a similar complaint, we know exactly who was involved in that patients care and whether a therapeutic intervention worked. For hospitalists, those elements are particularly important because a lot of our patients have exacerbation of chronic recurring illnesses like COPD or congestive heart failure, and they come back to the hospital often. You need a concise discharge summary when patients are readmitted to figure out what exactly happened to them during prior admissions. The study did not find an association between the quality of discharge summaries and the length of time post-discharge that they were dictated, but the average time between discharge and dictation was 55 days. Did that strike you as inordinately l
