The Pediatric Hospital Care Improvement Project’s (P-HIP) Hospital-to-Home Transitions Collaborative sought to improve overall performance on hospital-to-home transitions by improving on the quality of the written discharge instructions provided to families/caregivers.
Transitions of care can occur in multiple ways; from one inpatient setting to another, from inpatient to outpatient, from one outpatient provider to another, or from the inpatient setting to home. These transitions create situations where the care of a pediatric patient is handed off to a new set of healthcare providers and/or to home-based family caregivers. An effective transition will support the likelihood of reducing the incidence of inappropriate care and potential medical complications in the next setting of care.
The Seattle Children’s Center of Excellence on Quality of Care Measures for Children with Complex Needs (COE4CCN) created Transitions of Care Quality Measures. Three measures were developed to capture the quality of transitions in the inpatient setting, and from the inpatient setting to home. These quality measures used medical records as a data source. Of the three measures developed, family/caregiver written discharge instructions content was selected for a quality improvement collaborative because it demonstrated the most variation in baseline performance across participating hospitals. The measure was also selected due to high scores among a few teams. These high scoring teams provided a starting place for identifying best practices for improving performance on the hospital-to-home transition record provided to the family of the patient.
The intended audiences for this toolkit include providers, hospitals, and medical staff who are involved in discharge documentation for pediatric patients.
