An Electronic Patient Safety Checklist Tool for Interprofessional Healthcare Teams and Patients

Introduction: Fragmentation of healthcare poses a threat to patient safety, and leads to inefficient care 1 . Several studies have demonstrated the usefulness of checklists to improve the quality of care such as increasing treatment compliance and reducing complications and medical errors in the clinical setting 2,3 . In the current model of care, however, physicians and nurses have separate patient care checklists to organize, manage, and hand off critical patient-based tasks. The goal of this study is to facilitate and support interaction and communication among all the members of a patient care team by developing, implementing and evaluating an electronic Patient Safety Checklist Tool (PSCT). Physicians and nurses will enter data into the PSCT and the contents will be shared with multidisciplinary team members and patients and family to review and provide input. The PSCT is an electronically integrated interdisciplinary suite of tools that will incorporate adaptations of existing validated safety checklists for healthcare providers to use during team rounds. Information dashboards can also be generated to provide a better overview of a patient’s care for healthcare providers and patients than the current method of tracking a patient’s hospitalization. Information will flow from electronic patient platforms to a Rounding Checklist and from the Rounding Checklist to the Care Team Dashboards. The PSCT would allow all members of a healthcare team to add, edit, and view a patient’s safety items and plan of care.