ArticleAcademic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges2014
Rethinking the discharge summary: a focus on handoff communication.
Article in Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Edge-Hosted LLM-Assisted NICU Discharge Summary Generation: Field-Level Evaluation Using a Clinician-Defined Rubric.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Optimizing Discharge Summaries: A Survey of Inpatient Clinician Perspectives and the Path to Standardization.Journal of general internal medicine · 2026Article
- Article
- Automated generation of discharge summaries: leveraging large language models with clinical data.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Bridging Inpatient and Outpatient Care: A Scoping Review on Discharge Summary Documentation Timeliness and Quality.Journal of Brown hospital medicine · 2025Review
- Article
- The Quality of Discharge Summaries at Al-Shaab Hospital, Sudan, in 2022: The First Cycle of a Clinical Audit.Cureus · 2023Article
- Use of a quality improvement strategy to introduce co-design of the mental health discharge plan in rural and remote New South Wales.The Australian journal of rural health · 2021Article
- What makes a "successful" or "unsuccessful" discharge letter? Hospital clinician and General Practitioner assessments of the quality of discharge letters.BMC health services research · 2021Article
- Article
- Investigating discharge communication for chronic disease patients in three hospitals in India.PloS one · 2020Article
- Evaluation of a Novel Handoff Communication Strategy for Patients Admitted from the Emergency Department.The western journal of emergency medicine · 2018Article
- Coder perspectives on physician-related barriers to producing high-quality administrative data: a qualitative study.CMAJ open · 2017Article
- Novel combined patient instruction and discharge summary tool improves timeliness of documentation and outpatient provider satisfaction.SAGE open medicine · 2017Article
- Semantic-Web Architecture for Electronic Discharge Summary Based on OWL 2.0 Standard.Acta informatica medica : AIM : journal of the Society for Medical Informatics of Bosnia & Herzegovina : casopis Drustva za medicinsku informatiku BiH · 2016Article
- Toward Medical Documentation That Enhances Situational Awareness Learning.AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium · 2016Article
- Improving Continuity of Care via the Discharge Summary.AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium · 2015Article
- Written discharge communication of diagnostic and decision-making information for persons living with dementia during hospital to skilled nursing facility transitions.Geriatric nursing (New York, N.Y.)Article
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3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The discharge summary is one of the most critical documents in medical care settings, but it is prone to systematic lapses that compromise the continuity of care. Discontinuity is fostered not only by incomplete inclusion of data (such as pending labs or medication reconciliations) but also by failure to document clinical reasoning and unfinished diagnostic workups. To correct these problems, the authors propose the Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendations (SBAR) format for discharge summaries. SBAR is already used for handoffs the way Subjective-Objective-Assessment-Plan is for progress notes. The SBAR format supports the concise presentation of relevant information along with guidance for action. It shifts the paradigm and purpose of the discharge summary away from being a "Captain's Log" (a historical record of the events, actions taken, and their consequences during hospitalization) and towards being a handoff document (a tool for communication between health professionals aimed at ensuring continuity of care). To test SBAR as a template for discharge summaries, the authors have initiated a study to document the impact of the SBAR model on the quality of trainees' thinking in discharge summaries.
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