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Travel ticket helps New Jersey facility improve handoffs

Accreditation Connection, September 8, 2008

Sometimes, it’s all about the journey, not the destination. And in hospitals, the journey a patient takes can be difficult to track. For this reason, focusing on handoff communication is key. And in some facilities, developing a travel ticket for patients can help improve patient safety and handoff communication.

It was this focus that led Hackensack (NJ) University Medical Center to take a look at its handoff communication and look for a simple way to improve it.

Handoff communication improvement has been the focus of a National Patient Safety Goal for the past two years but remains a challenge for many facilities.

The Joint Commission [formerly JCAHO] didn’t have any kind of paper requirements for this goal, so we took inventory across the organization to see what was in place as far as handoff communication,” says Renee Harvey, MPA, FACHE, accreditation compliance coordinator at Hackensack.

Access the full story in the September issue of Briefings on The Joint Commission. Access is free for BOJ subscribers; nonsubscribers can purchase a copy of the story for $10 by clicking here.

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