NYAM Researchers Honored by the American Medical Informatics Association

Researchers from NYAM’s Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health won one of five distinguished scientific paper awards from the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) at its 2012 Annual Symposium in early November. Joanna Abraham, Thomas Kannampallil, and Vimla Patel, along with their clinical colleagues Bela Patel and Khalid Almoosa, authored the paper Ensuring Patient Safety in Care Transitions: Empirical Evaluation of a Handoff Intervention Tool based on the empirical research conducted at the University of Texas-Houston and Memorial-Hermann Hospital.

Dr. Abraham and her colleagues found a significant percentage of medical errors often occur during clinician handoffs at care transitions, and subsequently designed and evaluated a Handoff Intervention Tool (HAND-IT) to streamline and simplify the communication between clinicians. The tool design incorporated a structured information organization that was found to be successful in not only mitigating handoff related errors, but also improving clinical reasoning and decision-making outcomes.

“Efficient and effective transitions in care – within hospital settings and among providers in critical care practice – are an important element in safe and coordinated patient management,” said Dr. Vimla Patel, Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health at NYAM. “Such health safety, both in practice settings and in the community, has long been a major interest of NYAM and our research team. The work by Dr. Abraham and her colleagues addresses the facilitation of care transition through use of a tool that supports the handoff of care from one team to another in the medical intensive care unit, and the findings from this study can be generalized to primary care as well as to other care transitions for specialized populations, such as the elderly.”

The five winning papers were selected from about 1,200 papers submitted to AMIA and 200 selected for the conference. The AMIA Annual Symposium is the world’s premier scientific meeting for biomedical and health informatics, which is the field devoted to the science of using information to improve individual health, health care, public health, and biomedical research.

This study was funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, through a grant to Dr. Vimla Patel on Cognitive Complexity and Error in Critical Care. Supplementary funding was provided by training support for Dr. Abraham through a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Download the paper here.

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Posted on November 9, 2012

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