Measuring the Quality of Communications During Pediatric Care Transitions

To evaluate the quality of communication in transitioning hospitalized children between sites of care, researchers developed and tested three measures, applying the RAND/University of California, Los Angeles Delphi method and using data from three children's hospitals and two community hospitals.

The three measures were quality of hospital-to-home transition record content, timeliness of discharge communication from inpatient to outpatient providers, and quality of intensive care unit (ICU) to regular inpatient unit transition note. Each measure was scored on a scale from 0 to 100; higher scores indicated better quality or timeliness. Results were as follows:

• Of 927 charts reviewed, 624 were from the children's hospitals and 303 from the comm…