Development of a database model to support inpatient physicians' patient handoff needs

Medicine is faced with the unintended safety consequences of increased physician-to-physician handoffs of patients. Patient care had traditionally been provided by one physician who would follow a patient throughout his or her admission, but recent changes including restrictive resident duty hours and development of hospitalists have increased the frequency of transitioning patient care from physician to physician or team to team. I propose that a purpose-designed database would be able to address physicians’ needs for efficiency and safety, administrators’ needs for data to be used for business intelligence, and the billing offices’ needs for legibility and efficiency.