International journal of medical informatics
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Ineffective handovers in patient care, including those where information loss occurs between care providers, have been identified as a risk to patient safety. Computerization of health information is often offered as a solution to improve the quality of care handovers and decrease adverse events related to patient safety. The purpose of this paper is to broaden our understanding of clinical handover as a patient safety issue, and to identify socio-technical issues which may come to bear on the success of computer based handover tools. ⋯ We suggest that the contextual nature of information, ethical and medico-legal issues arising in relation to information handover, and issues related to data standards and system interoperability must be addressed if computerized health information systems are to achieve improvements in patient safety related to handovers in care.