Advancing Health Information Exchange (HIE) During Inter-hospital Transfer (IHT) to Improve Patient Outcomes

The transfer of patients between acute care hospitals (inter-hospital transfer, IHT) is often undertaken to provide patients with needed specialized care that is unavailable at the transferring hospital. IHT occurs regularly, with over 100,000 Medicare patients undergoing IHT annually and with higher frequency among patients with select medical conditions (i.e., acute myocardial infarction), those who are critically ill, and those with multiple chronic conditions (MCC). Although all hospital-based care transitions expose patients to the risks of discontinuity of care, patients who undergo IHT are highly vulnerable to these risks given their illness severity and the fact that IHT involves transfer between providers, settings, and systems of care, thereby lacking potential safe-guards against potential gaps in communication. The overall goals of this study are to leverage the investigators' extensive research experience in IHT and health information technology innovation, including an in-depth understanding of the essential clinical information required for effective HIE, to design, implement, and rigorously evaluate an intervention to improve HIE during IHT. The investigators propose to implement the intervention in 3 use cases with different levels of integration between sending and receiving hospitals. The platform will use existing data standards to ensure interoperability while also optimizing data visualization and workflow. The investigators will then evaluate the effects of the intervention on medical errors and adverse events, evaluate use and usability of the platform, and conduct a mixed methods evaluation to identify best practices for further refining, disseminating, implementing, and sustaining this intervention across different institutions. To achieve this, the Specific Aims of this study are: Aim 1: To utilize user-centered design principles and prior knowledge and experience of essential information required during IHT to refine a currently functional inter-operable HIE platform that improves reliability of and access to necessary clinical information during IHT and to implement it in 3 use cases: hospitals within the same health system, hospitals in different systems that share a common EHR, and hospitals in different systems that use different EHRs. Aim 2: To evaluate the impact of this intervention on clinician-reported medical errors; medical errors attributable to sub-optimal information exchange; adverse events; and other measures of patient safety and workflow, using interrupted time series methodology. Aim 3: To evaluate the utilization and perceived usability of the HIE platform from the perspective of users who interact with the platform, including clinicians who transfer and accept IHT patients, clinicians at accepting hospitals who admit transferred patients, medical records personnel at transferring hospitals, and access center personnel at accepting hospitals; and identify facilitators and barriers to implementation. Aim 4: To combine data on use, usability and barriers to implementation from end-users with input from steering committee members to develop a plan for further refinement of the platform and a toolkit for widespread adoption at MGB and dissemination to other similar organizations. The proposed study will provide a novel, user-centered implementation and evaluation of HIE in order to improve the quality of care and patient outcomes during IHT, an understudied, high-risk care transition impacting a vulnerable patient group. This study includes a purposeful evaluation of IHT between hospitals with different levels of affiliation and EHR integration, in addition to rigorous evaluation of use and usability, and barriers and facilitators of implementation across different institutions to identify best practices for dissemination and implementation. The lessons learned will be used to inform successful and sustained adoption by other health care systems, thus broadly improving care provided to transferred patients.