SynopSIS: integrating physician sign-out with the electronic medical record.
BACKGROUND
Safe delivery of care depends on effective communication among all health care providers, especially during transfers of care. The traditional medical chart does not adequately support such communication. We designed a patient-tracking tool that enhances provider communication and supports clinical decision making.


OBJECTIVE
To develop a problem-based patient-tracking tool, called Sign-out, Information Retrieval, and Summary (SynopSIS), in order to support patient tracking, transfers of care (ie, sign-outs), and daily rounds.


METHODS
Tertiary-care, university-based teaching hospital.


METHODS
SynopSIS compiles and organizes information from the electronic medical record to support hospital discharge and disposition decisions, daily provider decisions, and overnight or cross-coverage decisions. It reflects the provider's patient-care and daily work-flow needs.


RESULTS
We plan to use Web-based surveys, audits of daily use, and interdisciplinary focus groups to evaluate SynopSIS's impact on communication between providers, quality of sign-out, patient continuity of care, and rounding efficiency.


CONCLUSIONS
We expect SynopSIS to improve care by facilitating communication between care teams, standardizing sign-out, and automating daily review of clinical and laboratory trends. SynopSIS redesigns the clinical chart to better serve provider and patient needs.
Sarkar
Urmimala
U
Department of Medicine, University of California-San Francisco, San Francisco, CA. 94143-1211, USA. urmimala@stanfordalumni.org
Carter
Jonathan T
JT
Omachi
Theodore A
TA
Vidyarthi
Arpana R
AR
Cucina
Russell
R
Bokser
Seth
S
van Eaton
Erik
E
Blum
Michael
M
D003142:Communication; D003266:Continuity of Patient Care / Q000458:organization & administration; D017144:Focus Groups; D005568:Forms and Records Control / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized / Q000295:instrumentation*; D019982:Organizational Case Studies; D015397:Program Evaluation / Q000379:methods; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care; D012495:San Francisco; D012985:Software Design