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During the course of a hospitalization, patients are seen by a variety of specialists in addition to the physician who has primary responsibility for their care.

The faulty communication, inappropriate timing, inadequate details, illegibility, lost paperwork or other problems may keep the specialists' recommendations from being evaluated and implemented. They developed to overcome these barriers and to complement physician-to-physician communication processes already in place. The computer tool facilitated convenient flow of information, providing both the specialists and the patient's primary-care physician with detailed information on the patient and the advice sought at the right time and place. They found that when using the new computer tool, medical recommendations from geriatrics consultants were implemented 30 percent more frequently than when it was not used.

Consulted specialists might not have the full clinical or most current picture of the patient. Automatic electronic notification of the exact specialist recommendations eliminated the need for the patient's primary doctor to leaf through a thick medical file to see the specialist's recommendations and the details of these recommendations. The tool also lets the specialists know if their recommendations have been implemented by the patient's primary doctor. All these benefits can be very important for patient safety.

The use of the new clinical support tool may save health-care dollars by decreasing delays in care, improving patient safety, and prioritizing specialty treatment. The next step is to see how big a difference implementation of the system makes in patients' outcomes, duration of hospitalization and costs of care.

Source: Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association .