Medical Errors During the Transition from ED to Inpatient Care

Prevention of medical errors is an important focus for modern medicine, and transfer of care between providers has been identified as one source of error. To examine characteristics of errors during the process of emergency-department–to–internal-medicine transfer of care, these authors surveyed 264 emergency medicine and internal medicine house staff, emergency physician assistants, and hospitalists at an urban academic medical center. Respondents were asked to provide details about adverse patient events that they thought had occurred because of poor communication between EPs and admitting physicians.

Of 139 respondents, 40 (29%) reported 36 incidents in which a patient had suffered an adverse event or near miss after an ED-to-inpatient tr…