Addressing handoff gaps: the case for healthcare workflow automation

4-minute read

Effective clinical communication is essential for delivering high-quality patient care.

The Joint Commission’s Sentinel Event Data 2024 Annual Review shows that gaps in communication continue to create patient safety risks for healthcare organizations. In fact, the six most reported sentinel event types have communication failures as a leading contributing factor, occurring with team communication and staff-to-staff communication at patient handoffs.¹

Automating communication workflows to support more consistent handoffs

Healthcare leaders have a clear opportunity to strengthen handoffs and help critical information reach the right clinician at the right time.

From a technology perspective, improving handoff reliability takes more than a communication device, a smartphone app or a policy. It calls for a more connected way to help care teams access, share and act on critical information. It means creating communication workflows that help information move more reliably, with fewer manual steps and fewer opportunities for delay.

Our SmartHospital Platform helps healthcare organizations move from communication gaps to coordinated action. It’s a unified digital infrastructure that brings together our intelligent sensors, connected beds and stretchers, a clinical communication platform and third-party systems, all integrated via our intelligent middleware. (Vocera Communications and care.ai have been part of Stryker since 2022 and 2024 respectively.)

In our platform, interoperability helps turn siloed data into timely, shareable information that supports care teams in the moment. It creates new opportunities to automate communication workflows so clinicians can receive and act on critical information more efficiently. By integrating communication tools with your clinical and operational systems, important updates can be delivered directly to clinicians’ mobile devices. And with a dynamic master directory and intelligent rules, our middleware helps the right information reach the right recipients at the right time.

We work with healthcare teams to build automated communication workflows around the real challenges they need to solve. Those workflows can be highly sophisticated, bringing together signals from multiple systems, applying intelligent rules and delivering the right information directly to a specific clinician or care team. (For example, a bed exit alarm from a connected ProCuity bed can be paired with a fall risk score from the EHR and sent to the patient’s nurse, with automatic escalation if that nurse is unavailable.) Or they can be as relatively simple as a call flow where a single voice command activates an entire response team.

Supporting more complete and connected handoff information

The Joint Commission recommends using structured handoff communication tools. Its Sentinel Event Alert, issue 58, advises that handoff communication should include patient context, including:²

• Lists of allergies, medications and to-do items
• Dated lab tests and vital signs
• Illness assessment
• Code status
• Patient summary

Our mobile application can present all this information, and can be configured with a templated checklist to help systematize structured handoff approaches.

The Joint Commission also advises using EHR capabilities and other technologies to enhance hand-offs.² Our communication devices and apps can integrate with your EHR, nurse call, patient monitors, lab systems, connected beds, AI sensors and more through our intelligent middleware. To help reduce delays in critical information flow, clinicians can receive alarms, critical lab results and/or STAT order notifications directly. In addition, our analytics offering can track system utilization in relation to sentinel events, and help identify root causes faster.

What healthcare leaders can do now

Healthcare leaders don’t need to wait for another event or claim to act. The Joint Commission’s guidance is straightforward:^1,2

• Make communication reliability a leadership priority by standardizing handoffs, supporting staff training and reinforcing accountability.
• Use workflow and technology improvements to deliver critical information in real time, support follow-up and reduce missed or delayed communication.
• Track outcomes, learn from events and strengthen shared understanding across teams, patients and families to support a better patient experience.

The goal is not simply to add another device or application, but to strengthen the systems, rules and governance that help the right information reach the right clinician at the right time.

Learn more

Stryker is one of the world's leading medical technology companies. Alongside our customers around the world, we impact more than 150 million patients annually. To learn more about clinical communication and collaboration, workflow intelligence and the SmartHospital Platform, visit the SmartHospital Platform page.