The impact of physician handoffs on the outcomes of admitted emergency department patients: a medical administrative database retrospective cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction A physician handoff is the process through which physicians transfer the primary responsibility of a care unit. The emergency department (ED) is a fast-paced and crowded environment where the risk of information loss between shifts is significant. Yet, the impact of handoffs between emergency physicians on patient outcomes remains understudied. We performed a retrospective cohort study in the ED to determine if handed-off patients, when compared to non-handed-off patients, were at higher risk of negative outcomes. Methods We included every adult patient first assessed by an emergency physician and subsequently admitted to hospital in one of the five sites of the CHU de Québec-Université Laval during fiscal year 2016-17. Primary outcome was mortality. Secondary outcomes were incidence of ICU admission and surgery and hospital length of stay. We conducted propensity score based analysis accounting for patient and hospital clusters and adjusting for demographics, multiple disease severity indicators and ED processes indicators, including crowding. Results 21,136 ED visits and 17,150 unique individuals were included in the study. Median[Q1-Q3] age, Charlson score, door-to-emergency-physician time and ED length of stay were 71[55-83] years old, 3[1-4], 48 [24,90] minutes, 20.8[9.9,32.7] hours, respectively. In propensity score analysis (OR handoff/no handoff [CI95%] or GMR[Cl95%]), handoff status was not associated with mortality (1.08[0.93,1.26]), ICU admission (1.01[0.87,1.18]) or hospital length of stay (1.02[0.94-1.10]). Sensitivity and sub-group based analyses yielded no further information. Conclusion Emergency physicians’ handoffs were not associated with an increase in risk of severe in-hospital adverse events. Further studies are needed to explore the impact of ED handoffs on adverse events of low and moderate severity. What is already known on this subject Handoffs are widely believed to affect patient outcomes in the ED, although data remains scarce. What did this study ask What is the impact of handoffs between emergency physicians on patient outcomes What this study adds Handed off patients do not seem to do worse than non handed off patients concerning majors outcomes (mortality, ICU admission, LOS). Why does it matter to clinicians? In the ED, handoffs may not represent a risk to patient outcomes. QI efforts may be better invested in other care inefficiencies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".