Testimonials

As CMO for a large health system including an academic medical center, 25 community hospitals and 2600 physicians, I am deeply concerned about safety during transitions of care. This approach has the potential to enhance safety at the grass roots level where the transfer of responsibility takes place. We will be interested in participating in further development or use of this approach (and related tools) as soon as they are available.

I-PASS has made a significant improvement in patient safety at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, and we are now spreading it across Stanford Medical Center as well. I have seen first-hand how the I-PASS framework has helped expose potential patient safety errors and saved patients from having to experience these errors. As a residency program director, I have seen how easy it is to teach and implement. This is the single most effective patient safety educational bundle that I have seen in my 9 years of program leadership!

I-PASS has become part of our onboarding process for pediatric residents, who bring this structured framework for handoffs to all subsequent care environments. Our hospitalists have adopted I-PASS as well, and it interfaces with our EPIC electronic medical record to generate I-PASS format reports automatically. This functionality has allowed I-PASS to be part of our program and our hospital's safety culture and has the potential to dramatically improve patient safety in an era of frequent transitions of care.

Every patient knows that poor communication can lead to errors. I-PASS is a simple, structured communication method that has led to a 30% reduction in medical error in pilot hospitals. There are very few interventions in the world that can claim that kind of success rate.

Healthcare has changed dramatically and handoffs, which were never very good, have now become dangerously inadequate. This has become more acute with a greater range of diagnoses and treatments, team-based care and work hour restrictions. We lag far behind other high reliability professions.

I strongly support I-PASS.  With the transition to resident shift work, the number of hand-offs between the house staff has greatly increased.  I-PASS had improved this process and made patient safety more effective at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.