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Research and applications
Chart biopsy: an emerging medical practice enabled
by electronic health records and its impacts on
emergency department–inpatient admission
handoffs
Brian Hilligoss,1 Kai Zheng2,3
1
College of Public Health,
Division of Health Services
Management and Policy, Ohio
State University, Columbus,
Ohio, USA
2
Department of Health
Management and Policy,
School of Public Health,
University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, Michigan, USA
3
School of Information,
University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, Michigan, USA
Correspondence to
Dr Brian Hilligoss, Division of
Health Services Management
and Policy, College of Public
Health, Ohio State University,
200C Cunz Hall, 1841 Neil
Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210,
USA; bhilligoss@cph.osu.edu
Received 25 April 2012
Accepted 10 August 2012
Published Online First
8 September 2012
ABSTRACT
Objective To examine how clinicians on the
receiving end of admission handoffs use electronic
health records (EHRs) in preparation for those handoffs
and to identify the kinds of impacts such usage may
have.
Materials and methods This analysis is part of a twoyear ethnographic study of emergency department (ED)
to internal medicine admission handoffs at a tertiary
teaching and referral hospital. Qualitative data were
gathered and analyzed iteratively, following a grounded
theory methodology. Data collection methods included
semi-structured interviews (N = 48), observations (349
hours), and recording of handoff conversations (N = 48).
Data analyses involved coding, memo writing, and
member checking.
Results The use of EHRs has enabled an emerging
practice that we refer to as pre-handoff “chart biopsy”:
the activity of selectively examining portions of a patient’s
health record to gather specific data or information about
that patient or to get a broader sense of the patient and
the care that patient has received. Three functions of chart
biopsy are identified: getting an overview of the patient;
preparing for handoff and subsequent care; and defending
against potential biases. Chart biopsies appear to impact
important clinical and organizational processes. Among
these are the nature and quality of handoff interactions,
and the quality of care, including the appropriateness of
dispositioning of patients.
Conclusions Chart biopsy has the potential to enrich
collaboration and to enable the hospital to act safely,
efficiently, and effectively. Implications for handoff
research and for the design and evaluation of EHRs are
also discussed.
INTRODUCTION
Health information technology (HIT) has been
widely viewed as holding great promise for bridging the quality chasm of the US healthcare system
and for bending the curve of ever-rising costs.1 2
Although evidence is not yet conclusive,3 studies
are beginning to demonstrate the anticipated value
of HIT.4–6 Additionally, the increased availability of
data generated from widespread use of electronic
health records (EHRs) is enabling transformative
changes in the US healthcare system, including payfor-performance, patient-centered medical home
models, disease surveillance, and clinical, translational, and health services research.7–9
The majority of existing evaluation studies,
however, have focused on linking HIT adoption to
260
outcomes, wherein ‘adoption’ is often defined as a
healthcare facility ‘having’ an HIT system (or not)
and ‘outcomes’ are usually measured according to a
narrowly defined set of productivity or quality indicators.5 10–12 While this approach is extremely valuable, it is often inadequate for pinpointing which
processes, altered by the use of HIT, are actually
responsible for the impacts observed. Consequently,
the ability of these studies to inform future work
on addressing deficiencies or replicating successes is
limited. Furthermore, HIT use may contribute to
many subtle changes in clinical work and clinician
perceptions, the effects of which can be difficult
to quantify or may not directly manifest through
outcomes-driven analyses.
In this paper, we identify and describe an emerging, EHR-enabled practice, which we call ‘chart
biopsy’, and which we define as ‘the activity of
examining a patient’s health record to orient
oneself to the patient and the care that patient has
received in order to inform subsequent conversations about or care of the patient’. Drawing on
data from a 2-year ethnographic study, we demonstrate how the use of an inpatient EHR system
empowers general medicine physicians—who are
on the receiving end during emergency department
(ED) to general medicine admissions—to be better
informed about patient cases and thus better positioned in handoff conversations. Our immediate
objective is to identify the types of impacts that
such usage may have on admission handoff, an
important clinical process deserving a closer look
in its own right. Our broader objective is to demonstrate how the unprecedented availability and
accessibility of electronic patient care data, enabled
through the use of EHRs, help to break information monopoly and engender new possibilities of
information use and reuse in healthcare settings.
These changes introduced by the use of EHRs have
the potential to make clinical practice safer, more
efficient, and more effective. Implications for
handoff research and for the design and evaluation
of EHR systems are also discussed.
BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE
In complex healthcare systems with highly specialized divisions of labor, transitions in care are inevitable but come with significant potential risks to
safety and quality of care.13 14 Patient handoffs are
the communication activities meant to coordinate
these transitions through the transfer of information, responsibility, and control.15 However,
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concerns that handoffs often fail to adequately coordinate such
transitions have prompted a movement to improve patient
handoff processes.16
Although some acknowledge that handoffs often require
interaction,17 18 including the opportunity for the receiving
party to ask questions,13 19 much of the handoff research to
date has implicitly adopted a conceptual model of handoff as
a largely one-way information transfer activity in which the
party handing off has a virtual monopoly on information.20 21
This conceptual view, in turn, has shaped approaches to
measurement and improvement. For instance, efforts to
standardize handoffs have focused on structuring the information provided by the party handing off.22–25 Similarly,
efforts to evaluate handoffs have measured the completeness,22 26–31 and accuracy27 29 32 of information transferred,
and the retention of information by the receiving
party.23 33 34 While these various efforts have made important contributions, they have either overlooked the role of the
receiving party or else positioned that party as a passive
recipient of information, whose primary active role is to ask
questions for clarification or to confirm information transferred through read-back techniques.35
This conceptual view of handoff as an information transfer
activity also overlooks the potential of EHRs to influence the
formation of knowledge on the part of the receiving party. The
available studies that have explored how EHRs can be used to
support handoffs generally show that the quality of transitions
can be improved when EHR data are used to populate handoff
documents automatically,36–39 sometimes with the side benefit
of reducing redundant data entry.40 To our knowledge,
however, few studies have explored how EHRs are used by
parties on the receiving end of handoffs before entering handoff
conversations and how this practice may affect the subsequent
handoff interaction.
One transition where we might expect to see intensive EHR
use by receiving parties prior to handoff is during admissions
when patients are transitioned from an ED to an inpatient
unit. Communication during such handoffs can be particularly challenging because: (1) parties involved tend to come
from different medical specializations with distinct perspectives on and approaches to illness and treatment; and (2)
patients passing through EDs tend to be at particularly vulnerable points in the trajectories of their illness episodes.41 42
These factors can lead to disagreements over diagnoses, different opinions regarding disposition, and the need to negotiate
during admission handoffs.43–45 Thus, given the challenging
nature of communication and interaction in ED–inpatient
admission handoffs, clinicians on the receiving end would
have a strong incentive to make full use of EHR data prior to
handoff.
they were analyzed, and the emerging analysis was used to
direct subsequent data collection efforts. For the sake of simplicity, we describe our data collection and data analysis in separate subsections below.
Study site and study participants
All data were gathered at the University of Michigan Health
System (UMHS), a highly specialized tertiary teaching and
referral hospital. Each year, more than 1.6 million outpatient
and emergency visits, 45 000 hospital stays, 61 000 surgeries,
and 4000 births take place at facilities operated by UMHS
hospitals and health centers. A web-based institutional EHR
system, called CareWeb, has been used at UMHS since 1998.
CareWeb contains clinician notes, laboratory test results, radiographic images, and other basic patient information from both
inpatient stays and outpatient visits. In addition, the system
contains records pertaining to a patient’s ED stay, such as
nurse triage notes, admission requests, and a time-stamped list
of activities undertaken in the ED.
At UMHS, patients may be admitted through the ED to
different inpatient services, including general internal medicine, cardiology, hematology and oncology, gastroenterology,
and general surgery, among others. In our field investigations,
we focused primarily on three adult care units: the ED, the
general medicine residency service, and the general medicine
hospitalist service. The general medicine services were
selected because they receive the largest volume of admissions from the ED.
Data collection involved theoretical sampling to identify
prospective study participants. Theoretical sampling is a purposive sampling approach commonly used in grounded
theory in which participants are selected based on emerging
analyses.50 51 Findings reported in this paper are drawn from
data obtained from a total of 73 physicians and surgeons. Of
these, 40 were emergency medicine physicians (13 attendings
and 27 residents), 28 were internal medicine physicians (17
attendings, 10 residents, and one fellow), and five were surgeons (one attending and four residents). In this paper we
focus on how inpatient physicians use EHRs to prepare for
admission handoffs; therefore, most of the data we report are
taken from interviews and observations with internal medicine physicians.
Some participants were recruited through general email
announcements sent out periodically during the course of the
study. Others we recruited at the suggestion of previous participants. Still others volunteered when they learned about the
study by word-of-mouth; all volunteers were accepted for
participation.
Data collection
MATERIALS AND METHODS
To address the gap in the literature, we draw from a 2-year,
field-based qualitative investigation and examine the role that
EHRs play in admission handoffs between the ED and general
medicine services. Field-based qualitative research is particularly
useful for describing and understanding how technologies are
actually used in practice and how that use interacts with other
work processes and organizational structures.46 Such
approaches have been commonly used in health informatics
research and have yielded valuable insights.47–49
In this study, we used a grounded theory methodology,50 51
an inductive approach in which data were collected and analyzed in an ongoing, iterative process. As data were gathered,
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We triangulated our data collection in order to ensure a richly
contextual and holistic dataset and to improve the trustworthiness46 52 of the study. Our multiple data collection methods
included semi-structured interviews, observations, and recorded
handoff conversations. The first author gathered all data
between January 2009 and March 2011. Informed consent was
obtained from all participants prior to data collection. The
identities of participants and patients were removed from all
transcripts and field notes before analyses.
Semi-structured interviews (N=48) each lasted about 1 h and
were used to gather participants’ perceptions about admission
handoff practices and challenges encountered. The exact topics
covered in the interviews varied over the course of the study
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Research and applications
based on the emerging analyses. All interviews were digitally
recorded and transcribed verbatim.
A total of 349 h of observations were conducted over the
2-year study period: 146 h in the ED, 108 h on the hospitalist
service, and 95 h on the general medicine residency service. The
first author shadowed 46 physicians and interacted with
numerous others; however, he did not directly participate in
clinical activities. Observations varied from 1 h to 8.5 h in
length, with an average of 5 h. Our observation data resulted
in more than 220 typed, single-spaced pages of field notes.
Between November 2009 and June 2010, we recorded a total
of 48 telephone handoff conversations between ED physicians
and general medicine hospitalists and residents. A trained
medical transcriptionist then transcribed these conversations,
yielding approximately 48 pages of single-spaced text.
Data analysis
Coding followed an inductive approach, by which themes were
allowed to emerge rather than being imposed on the data.50
Initial analyses involved in vivo coding53 to preserve our participants’ terms and perspectives, as well as process coding50 53 to
focus analyses on actions. During subsequent rounds of coding,
we consolidated related codes into broader themes, including
the central one discussed in this paper: ‘doing a chart biopsy’.
Memos written throughout the analysis process captured ideas
and emerging insights into the codes and were useful for constant comparison,51 making connections between codes and
among data.
Consistent with ethnographic approaches, we used member
checking54 to validate and further refine our research findings.
Early reports of this study were shared individually with five
participants (3 ED and 2 General Medicine physicians), who
were selected because they were particularly interested in and
articulate about the issues under study. Their feedback provided
additional data and helped clarify and sharpen the analysis.
RESULTS
In this section, we present our results organized around our
two main objectives: (1) to examine how physicians on the
receiving end of admission handoffs use EHRs in preparation
for those handoffs; and (2) to identify the kinds of impacts
that such usage may have. For the first objective, we describe
an EHR-enabled, emerging practice referred to as chart biopsy.
For the second objective, we report both the perceptions of
our participants and our own observations of how this practice
is influencing handoff interactions and the quality of admissions work.
patient records to aid the clinician in the process of learning
about the patient in order to inform subsequent conversations
about or care of that patient. Clinicians may perform chart
biopsies at any point in a patient’s care trajectory; however, in
this paper we focus on chart biopsies performed by inpatient
physicians prior to taking admission handoffs.
The practice of chart biopsy appears to be highly variable.
None of our participants reported being aware of any protocols
for conducting chart biopsies, nor had any of them ever
received formal training in the activity. However, similar to previous studies on clinical documentation,55–57 we observed clinicians informally sharing with one another advice on how to
find various kinds of information within the EHR to facilitate
the chart biopsy process. Not surprisingly then, the practice
varied considerably from one clinician to the next, and in some
cases even the same clinician conducted chart biopsies differently from one instance to the next. Here we describe some of
the actions we observed repeatedly, but also make note of
certain variations in behavior to provide a more complete
picture of clinicians’ chart biopsy activities.
Functions of chart biopsy
As summarized in table 1, chart biopsy serves at least three
functions: (1) getting an overview of the patient, (2) preparing
for handoff and subsequent care, and (3) defending against
potential biases. First, because time constraints typically
prevent extensive reading, pre-handoff chart biopsy usually
involves getting a general overview of the patient rather than a
thorough understanding. Often, even cursory encounters with
the record can produce influential impressions. For example,
simply by seeing the number of entries in the record or the
types of clinicians that have provided care to the patient in the
past, the inpatient physicians began forming impressions of
how ‘sick’ the patient was and the kinds of care that might be
needed. In some cases, the inpatient physicians developed
expectations of patients without reading a single note in the
record. In one example, seeing a note in the record from an
institution he recognized, one hospitalist proclaimed: ‘She’s
going to be sick: she’s in a nursing home’.
Table 1 Functions of chart biopsy
Function
Representative quotations
Getting an overview of the
patient
▸ It just gives you kind of an overall gist of the
patient, of how likely—I guess it just helps put
them on the continuum of sick versus not sick,
which is kind of what you first develop or your
reaction
▸ Field note excerpt: [The participant] sees recent
notes from a physician she recognizes by name and
knows to be an oncologist, so she presumes the
patient has cancer
▸ I’m also thinking, ‘What are they going to need
when they go home?’ I have to have those
questions in mind right from the get-go, even when
I’m admitting, even sometimes at the point of the
chart biopsy, so that I can anticipate their care
▸ Field note excerpt: [The participant] tells me he is
forming a differential diagnosis. Things he will be
listening for in the handoff in hopes of confirming or
ruling out
▸ It’s like buying a car. You don’t just take the
dealer’s word
▸ I just do what we call the chart biopsy real quick,
and then I call back and get the story. Because
again, … what they think is going on might not be
accurate
Chart biopsy: an emerging practice
At UMHS, once an ED physician has decided to admit a particular patient, that physician must send an alphanumeric page
to the inpatient physician who is accepting admissions for
the service to which the patient is expected to be admitted.
The inpatient physician then calls the ED physician, and the
handoff occurs over the telephone. Our analysis reveals that
the EHR enables a new step in this process, pre-handoff chart
biopsy, often taken by the receiving physician between the
time the ED physician sends the page and the time that the
inpatient physician calls back to take the handoff.
Chart biopsy is an in vivo term used by some of our study
participants. Just as the medical procedure of biopsy involves
the targeted selection, retrieval, and examination of bodily
tissue to aid in the process of diagnosis, so a chart biopsy
involves the targeted selection of information and data from
262
Preparing for handoff and
subsequent care
Defending against potential
biases
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Getting an overview of the patient’s case often involves
getting a sense of the patient’s illness trajectory and understanding where the patient currently is in that trajectory. But
illness trajectories are not always visible in individual data
points. Rather, the inpatient physician must look for patterns
across data and over time. Thus, in seeking an overview of
patient cases, physicians often looked at results of the same
diagnostic test gathered at different points in time. Typically,
this involved switching between documents/records stored in
the EHR, or opening multiple windows and switching between
them. One resident expressed the desire to be able to look at
such data from different visits side by side for easy comparison.
Second, chart biopsy is a preparatory activity: it prepares
inpatient physicians for handoff, for anticipating patient needs,
and for fulfilling documentation requirements. Our study participants referred to chart biopsy as doing ‘my homework’ and
‘my due diligence’, which lays a foundational understanding on
which information shared during the handoff can be built.
Chart biopsy also prepares inpatient physicians to assume
responsibility and begin planning care. During chart biopsy,
inpatient physicians often began thinking about additional
diagnostics, medications, and therapies they might order and
any other services that might need to be involved, such as
social work or sub-specialty care. By anticipating these needs
during chart biopsy, inpatient physicians on the receiving end
of admission handoffs felt they were better prepared to assume
responsibility and move care forward quickly and safely during
transitions. Finally, chart biopsy also prepares inpatient physicians for documentation tasks by providing an initial orientation to the patient’s past medical history, which may later be
used in the admission note.
Third, chart biopsy can act as a defense mechanism to
reexamine the ED physician’s understanding of the patient and
to guard against potential cognitive biases, such as diagnosis
momentum (ie, ‘the tendency for a particular diagnosis to
become established without adequate evidence’58). Rather than
simply accepting patients as presented in handoffs, inpatient
physicians used chart biopsies as opportunities to develop their
own understandings of patients and to analyze the appropriateness of admitting those patients and placing them on their services. For example, in an interview, a hospitalist recalled how a
pre-handoff chart biopsy had been instrumental in avoiding an
unnecessary admission: having received a page from the ED
about a patient being admitted for meningitis, the hospitalist
examined the patient’s laboratory test data during chart biopsy
and found a positive result for strep throat. In the subsequent
handoff, she used this information to engage the ED physician
in a re-examination of the case. Together they concluded that
the diagnosis was strep throat and that an admission was not
necessary. The hospitalist explained that they ‘discharged [the
patient] home with amoxicillin, but that was originally going
to be an admission for meningitis’.
First, chart biopsy is dependent in part on the practices and
technology (ie, alphanumeric paging system) used to notify the
inpatient physician of an upcoming admission. When the page
provides the patient’s identifier along with other information
about the patient, such as the admission diagnosis, chief complaint, or even the patient’s age, this additional information
has the effect of framing the patient and thereby suggesting
where to look in the record. For example, as one hospitalist
explained, ‘If it’s a patient with heart failure, I’ll look for their
last echocardiogram to see what their heart function is like’.
One hospitalist referred to this as ‘targeted searching’, in which
attention is focused on particular parts of the record in search
of specific information relevant to the physician’s present concerns. On the other hand, when the page provides no patient
identifier, the physician on the receiving end is not able to
locate the appropriate record in the EHR and, therefore, cannot
conduct a chart biopsy at all.
Second, past experiences also situate the chart biopsy process
and influence inpatient physicians’ thinking. For example, some
participants pointed to previous experiences in which they had
accepted handoffs from the ED, only subsequently to learn
details that suggested the patient did not require admission or
would have been better served on another service. Such experiences guide the information seeking of chart biopsy and focus
attention on certain common concerns in the cases of patients
with particular presenting conditions. These concerns often
relate to two triage questions: (1) is the admission necessary?
Table 2 Aspects that situate the process of chart biopsy
Aspect
How
Representative quotations
Notification
technology and
practices
Frames patient through
description, diagnosis, chief
complaint information, etc.
Past experiences
Attune the receiving
physician to certain
common concerns in the
case of patients with
particular presenting
conditions
Alerts clinician to issues not
mentioned in the
alphanumeric admission
page and triggers further
information seeking both
within the chart and with
ED physicians during the
subsequent handoff
conversation
Constrain the time spent in
the chart and the extent to
which the record is
examined
If a patient is being admitted
for something that is related to
a cancer, then I’ll look at the
last note from their oncologist,
because that will let me know
where is their cancer at right
now
I look them up, look for certain
criteria, make sure their
stability makes sense for the
floor as opposed to the ICU,
because sometimes that’s not
always been reviewed
Field note excerpt: [The
participant] looks up the
patient in CareWeb. She sees
that amylase lipase labs were
ordered in the ED. From this,
she knows [the admission]
will be ‘abdominal pain’
Information
encountered in the
chart
Other work
demands
A situated process
We also found that chart biopsy is a situated process, that is,
the steps taken appear to vary depending on several situational
aspects and the understanding of the patient that unfolds as
the clinician conducts the chart biopsy. In this section, we
describe five of these aspects, namely: (1) notification technology and practices, (2) past experiences, (3) information encountered in the chart, (4) other work demands, and (5) the EHR
system. We also demonstrate how these aspects situate the
process of chart biopsy. Table 2 provides a summary.
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EHR design
(including
functionality
and usability)
Enables or limits clinician’s
ability to see the big picture
Well by now I do have a
system [for chart biopsy],
unless, let’s say I’m swamped,
and I’m in seeing a patient,
and ER keeps paging me,
paging me, paging me. I step
out and just call without even
looking up
Field note excerpt: [The
participant] wants an easy
way to view labs from
previous visits side by side
with current labs. He has to
switch back and forth
between windows to compare
numbers
ED, emergency department; EHR, electronic health record; ER, emergency room; ICU;
intensive care unit.
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and (2) is the chosen service the most appropriate unit to
provide the anticipated care? It should be noted that although
this situating by past experiences may provide benefit in some
cases, it also has the potential to bias inpatient physicians’
thinking in favor of most recent cases.58 59
Third, the chart biopsy process itself is dynamic, with later
phases depending crucially on earlier ones. As a result of details
noticed in the chart, inpatient physicians sometimes developed
concerns about the care of the patient or the disposition plan.
These concerns, in turn, triggered further information seeking
both within the chart and with the ED physician during the
subsequent handoff conversation.
Fourth, other work demands constrain chart biopsy. The
amount of time spent and the extent of the record examined
vary in part depending on the demands placed on the receiving
physician’s time and attention by co-workers and by other
responsibilities. Feeling pressured to call the ED immediately
for handoff often resulted in inpatient physicians cutting short
or even forgoing chart biopsy altogether in some instances.
Finally, EHR design also affects inpatient physicians’ ability
to piece together data and see the bigger picture. For example, to
understand the trajectory of a patient’s illness, participants
often looked at results of the same diagnostic gathered at different points in time. However, because the EHR system provided
no convenient means for conducting this comparison, they
had to go backward and forward between documents/records
or open multiple windows and switch between them.
Furthermore, because EHR systems may not always contain an
up-to-the-minute record of all information and descriptors
about the patient, but only an evolving account, physicians may
gain a different understanding of the patient depending on
when they access the system relative to when information is
entered. As a result, sometimes the overviews obtained from prehandoff chart biopsy could be incomplete, out-of-date, or even
inaccurate. Typically these misunderstandings had to be worked
out during handoff conversations.
result of doing a chart biopsy they were better able to avoid
unnecessary admissions or inappropriate placement of patients.
They argued that chart biopsy enabled them to present an
alternative interpretation of some patients’ conditions and thus
to advocate alternative disposition plans. Regardless of whether
or not a pre-handoff chart biopsy was conducted, many of the
admission handoffs we observed exhibited the qualities of a
negotiation in which the handoff parties argued for or against
particular admission and placement decisions. While a complete
examination of the processes and the outcomes of such negotiations is beyond the scope of this paper (see43 45), our analyses illustrate that EHR-enabled pre-handoff chart biopsy has
emerged as a key practice redefining these negotiations. As we
observed, sometimes chart biopsy enabled the inpatient physician to argue more persuasively, and sometimes it reduced the
need for negotiations altogether, as when the information
gained from chart biopsy reinforced what the ED physician
subsequently presented during the admission handoff.
DISCUSSION
The widespread adoption of EHRs has significantly improved
the availability and accessibility of patient care data, thereby
creating new possibilities for information use and reuse that
may have the potential to improve the quality, safety, and
efficiency of clinical work. Documenting and assessing subtle
changes to work processes and information flows introduced
by EHR use is an important part of the ongoing work of evaluating the impacts of such systems—many of which may be difficult to quantify—in order to understand end-user behaviors
and to harness the full value of EHRs. The analyses reported in
this paper represent a step in that direction. Our qualitative
study of admissions work at a large tertiary hospital identifies
the newly emerging practice of chart biopsy, traces its effects
on admission handoffs between ED and general medicine physicians, and provides an illustrative example of EHRs’ transformative effects on patterns of coordination, communication,
and decision-making in complex healthcare systems.
Impacts of chart biopsy
Chart biopsies appear to impact important clinical processes
and outcomes. Among these are the nature and quality of
handoff interactions, and the quality of care, including the dispositioning of patients.
Pre-handoff chart biopsy may enrich the quality of the
handoff itself. The understanding constructed during a chart
biopsy enables the inpatient physician to listen, think, and interact more critically during the handoff, including asking more
meaningful questions and proposing alternative understandings
of the patient’s case. As a result, inpatient physicians in our
study reported feeling less ‘at the mercy’ of ED physicians for
information and understandings of patients. Furthermore, by
conducting a pre-handoff chart biopsy, they felt that they were
guarding against negative aspects of poor handoffs, including the
omission of important information, the inclusion of distracting
details, and ‘disorganized ramblings’. As partial evidence of these
positive impacts, our study participants pointed to instances
when they had failed to do pre-handoff chart biopsies as well as
to their prior experiences in hospitals that lacked EHRs. For
example, in the words of one hospitalist, handoffs at the institution where he formerly practiced would ‘bumble down the road’
in part because inpatient physicians at the receiving end would
have to enter the handoff situation knowing nothing about
the patient.
Therefore, conducting chart biopsies may directly influence
disposition decisions. Some participants reported that as a
264
The value of chart biopsy
We found that as a result of doing a chart biopsy prior to
handoff, parties on the receiving end were better positioned to
propose and explore alternative understandings of patients
and different approaches to care during handoff conversations.
Chart biopsy can enrich coordination and collaboration,
improving the hospital’s ability to act safely, efficiently, and
effectively. If handoff is an opportunity for the receiving party
to provide a fresh perspective and to catch errors, as others
have observed,60–62 then the practice of chart biopsy has the
potential to equip receiving parties to better seize this opportunity. However, in this study, we also observed considerable
variety in the practice, including inpatient physicians forgoing
chart biopsy altogether when other work demands intervened.
Likewise the organic, emerging nature of the chart biopsy practice means that clinicians are left to develop their own individual processes. These findings imply that hospitals may not
have realized the full potential of chart biopsy, and hence the
full value of EHRs. Further research is needed to identify best
practices to develop programs for training clinicians to perform
chart biopsies more effectively and efficiently, and to guide the
design of facilitating conditions and supporting technologies.
Similarly, cultural changes may be needed to emphasize the
importance of chart biopsy, and work process changes may be
required to ensure adequate opportunities for clinicians to
engage regularly in the chart biopsy practice.
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Research and applications
Nevertheless, this is not to suggest that the consequences of
chart biopsy are always beneficial. As we noted earlier, the
quality of the understanding constructed during chart biopsy
is partially contingent on the quality and completeness of
the information contained in the record, which in turn can be
partially contingent on the interoperability of electronic
systems63 64 and clinicians’ documentation practices.55 65 To
the extent that clinicians conducting chart biopsies develop
superficial or inaccurate impressions of the patient or of the
care the patient has received, the resulting negotiations during
handoff may be inefficient and produce misunderstandings or
even animosities. Furthermore, if—as some of our participants
suggested—work avoidance motivates certain negotiations in
admission handoffs, then chart biopsy may enable avoidance of
more work to the extent that it better equips the receiving clinician to argue against the disposition. While we believe the
practice of chart biopsy holds considerable promise to enrich
collaboration between providers and thereby to improve quality
of care, these negative aspects of chart biopsy underscore
the need for further examination of the practice so that both
EHRs and organizational structures can be better designed to
support it, and so that clinicians can be appropriately trained
to do it well.
The role of EHRs in facilitating chart biopsies
As illustrated in this study, EHRs open up new possibilities of
information reuse by enabling more convenient access to more
diverse information prior to handoff or other activities. None
of the chart biopsies reported in this paper would have been
possible in a paper-based operation, as records would have been
scattered across a variety of physical locations, inaccessible in
the brief time available prior to handoff. In many respects
then, the practice we have documented is an emerging phenomenon. As EHRs proliferate, we can expect to see more of
such practices and their effects on clinical work processes and
outcomes. For example, our observations also suggest that
chart biopsies are increasingly being conducted by attending
physicians before daily rounds or before rotating onto a service,
and that nurses have begun to conduct chart biopsies to inform
themselves of the actions of physicians and other types of
healthcare professionals. Such chart biopsy activities will likely
change the distribution of information and shape understandings of patients, thereby altering many clinical routines from
daily rounds to discharges, with potential impacts on patients
and the organization.
Importantly, however, it is not the EHR system itself that
alters clinical work processes and impacts safety, quality, and
efficiency. Rather, it is the practices that emerge and are reinforced as the technology is used that produce such transformative changes.66 67 To fully understand both the potential and
the actual impact of EHRs on important outcomes, additional
research is needed to examine how EHRs are enacted through
use and how this use evolves over time. Our study provides one
such examination.
Implications for handoff improvement and EHR redesign
Our findings also have implications for the conceptual models
and assumptions that largely dominate handoff research
and practical efforts to improve patient handoffs. Even when
parties on the receiving end of a handoff may not have previously cared for the patient, the information they gather from
chart biopsy can help to shape their thinking about the patient
and set in motion their evaluation of the disposition plan prior
to handoff. As a result, these clinicians enter handoff not as
J Am Med Inform Assoc 2013;20:260–267. doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2012-001065
passive recipients of information, but rather as active
co-constructors of an understanding of the patient and as
active participants in the planning of care. Handoff evaluation
and improvement efforts that overlook this reality and assume
handoff is a one-way transmission of information may miss
crucial details and valuable opportunities.
We must, therefore, alter our conceptual model of handoff to
account for interaction, co-construction of understanding, and
the active participation of the parties receiving responsibility.21
This means that research and improvement efforts need to
recognize the unique dynamics of those handoffs in which
receiving parties have some prior understanding of the patient
or some adequate means to obtain that understanding (eg,
through EHR-enabled chart biopsy). It also means that more
attention should be paid to the impact of the questions and
contributions to the handoff conversation made by the receiving party since these may shape not only the conversation
itself but also the ongoing care of the patient. An expanded
conceptual model accommodating such new forms of patient
handoff engendered by the use of EHRs is therefore warranted.
Furthermore, in order to develop handoff practices that realize
the full potential of electronic patient care data, hospitals may
need to enact larger cultural and process changes to foster a
view of handoffs less as information transfer activities and
more as exchanges of understandings and moments of active
collaboration.45
In addition, accreditation bodies such as The Joint
Commission, patient safety advocacy organizations such as
the Institute for Health Care Improvement, and funding agencies such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
have already shown interest in driving handoff improvement
through licensure requirements, standards, and toolkits. The
expanded conceptual model of handoff proposed in this paper
may provide valuable insights into the ongoing work of defining, guiding, and supporting new handoff practices in the
emerging digital era. Similarly, this model implies that faculty
who are developing handoff training curricula17 to comply
with the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical
Education requirements for improved continuity of care68 may
want to incorporate collaboration into their training and
evaluation metrics. The findings also suggest that such training programs can benefit greatly from including instruction on
the use of EHRs to better support the collaborative and
increasingly data-driven nature of patient care.
The findings of this study also have implications for EHR
redesign. For example, information fragmentation, a common
issue in current EHR design,64 69 segments relevant patient care
data into distinct functional areas (eg, diagnosis vs laboratory
tests vs medications). Our field observations suggest that information fragmentation may hinder the chart biopsy process, as
it necessitates significant navigation efforts in order to assemble
data from discrete screens and documents in order to construct
an understanding of the patient. Further, we found that our
participants relied on skimming and scanning—as opposed to
thorough reading—in order to quickly obtain a longitudinal
overview of the patient case. This suggests opportunities to
develop new functionalities, such as automated assembling of
clinical data from across visits to produce graphical representations of the patient’s illness trajectory over time70 in order to
improve the effectiveness and efficiency of chart biopsy activities. Similarly, future EHRs might provide more intelligent
information retrieval algorithms to facilitate selective reviewing
of specific clusters of patient care data (eg, all past tests and
treatments related to a particular disease) that may be scattered
265
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Research and applications
across clinician notes or across care episodes. They might also
include the capability of highlighting potentially concerning
divergences between visits.
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Limitations and strengths
Our study was conducted in a single institution and was
focused on one particular clinical activity: admission handoff.
It is reasonable to expect that the pre-handoff chart biopsy
practice might work differently in other institutions where
patient populations, clinician practice style, EHR and notification technologies, and hospital admission policies are different.
Likewise, the practice may be different when performed in
service to other clinical tasks or by other kinds of clinicians.
Our qualitative approach provides one perspective on an emerging phenomenon.
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Acknowledgments Michael Cohen, Karl Weick, Dr Sanjay Saint, Dr Anita Hart,
Dr Peter Embi, Ann McAlearney, and Elizabeth Yakel provided helpful advice and
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Contributors BH designed the study, gathered all of the data, conducted analyses,
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Funding This work was funded by a health services research dissertation grant
(R36HS018758) from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and in part by
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Chart biopsy: an emerging medical practice
enabled by electronic health records and its
impacts on emergency department−
inpatient admission handoffs
Brian Hilligoss and Kai Zheng
J Am Med Inform Assoc 2013 20: 260-267 originally published online
September 8, 2012
doi: 10.1136/amiajnl-2012-001065
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