title: Integrating Health Information Technology to Achieve Seamless Care Transitions.
abstract: Improving care transitions, or "handoffs" as patients migrate from one care setting to another, is a priority across stakeholder groups and health-care settings and additionally is included in national health-care goals set forth in the National Quality Strategy. Although many demonstrations of improved care transitions have succeeded, particularly for hospital discharges, ensuring consistent, high-quality, and safe transitions of care remains challenging. This paper highlights the potential for health information technology to become an increasing part of effective transitional care interventions, with the potential to reduce the resource burden currently associated with effective care transitions, the ability to spread improved practices to larger numbers of patients and providers efficiently and at scale, and, as health technology interoperability increases, the potential to facilitate critical information flow and feedback loops to clinicians, patients, and caregivers across disparate information systems and care settings.
authors: From the *Department of Medicine, University of Washington; †Beacon Community Program, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Washington, District of Columbia; ‡Center on Elder Care and Advanced Illness, Altarum Institute, Ann Arbor, Michigan; and § RxAnte, Inc. and Health Policy and Management, Gillings School of Global Public Health, UNC Chapel Hill, Virginia.
authors: Leah
authors: L
authors: Marcotte
authors: Janhavi
authors: J
authors: Kirtane
authors: Joanne
authors: J
authors: Lynn
authors: Aaron
authors: A
authors: McKethan
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards*; D010351:Patient Discharge / Q000592:standards*; D010360:Patient Transfer / Q000592:standards*