• Robert L Fogerty, Amy Schoenfeld, Mohammed Salim Al-Damluji, and Leora I Horwitz.
• Section of General Internal Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine, and Yale-New Haven Hospital Hospitalist Service, Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut.
• J Hosp Med. 2013 Nov 1;8(11):609-14.

BackgroundHospitalists are key providers of care to medical inpatients, and sign-out is an integral part of providing safe, high-quality inpatient care. There is little known about hospitalist-to-hospitalist sign-out.ObjectiveTo evaluate the quality of hospitalist/physician-extender sign-outs by assessing how well the sign-out prepares the night team for overnight events and to determine attributes of effective sign-out.DesignAnalysis of a written-only sign-out protocol on a nonteaching hospitalist service using prospective data collected by an attending physician survey during overnight shifts.SettingYale-New Haven Hospital, a 966-bed, urban, academic medical center in New Haven, Connecticut with approximately 13,700 hospitalist discharges annually.ResultsWe recorded 124 inquiries about 96 patients during 6 days of data collection in 2012. Hospitalists referenced the sign-out for 89 (74%) inquiries, and the sign-out was considered sufficient in isolation to respond to 27 (30%) of these inquiries. Hospitalists physically saw the patient for 14 (12%) of inquiries. Nurses were the originator for most inquiries (102 [82%]). The most common inquiry topics were medications (55 [45%]), plan of care (26 [21%]), and clinical changes (26 [21%]). Ninety-five (77%) inquiries were considered to be "somewhat" or "very" clinically important by the hospitalist.ConclusionsOverall, we found that attending hospitalists rely heavily on written sign-out to address overnight inquiries, but that those sign-outs are not reliably effective. Future work to better understand the roles of written and verbal components in sign-out is needed to help improve the safety of overnight care.© 2013 Society of Hospital Medicine.

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