When post-acute patients transfer to a home care setting, needed information often can get lost. But by implementing and further developing Continuity of Care Document standard codes, home care operators can greatly reduce this problem, a new study finds.
By some estimates, more than 12 million adults transfer from healthcare settings to home healthcare each year. Yet all too often, home care nurses tasked with delivering recovery and chronic condition assistance simply do not have adequate or timely data.
For the mixed methods study, investigators chose three Pennsylvania home healthcare agencies representing rural, suburban and urban locations. Each agency implemented the CCD standard. As a result, not a single admissions document was lost, even though the agencies had differing electronic health record and interoperability competencies.
Full findings appear in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
