Since 2015, the Transitions in Care (TiC) Committee has support family physicians to send patient summaries into the hospital upon receipt of admission notification. Evaluations of our work demonstrated its value to hospital-based clinicians, who routinely use Primary Care Provider Patient Summaries to assist with treatment and discharge planning. Summaries have alerted clinicians to medication allergies, relevant diagnoses and assessments that are not available in the hospital Electronic Health Record, and information about patients’ family and social circumstances that makes discharge planning more effective.

Based on the strength of our evaluation, Island Health agreed in 2017 to start scanning summaries into PowerChart, making them available electronically. Primary Care Provider Summaries can be faxed to a central location and Health Records staff ensure that they are placed on the chart. Summaries can now be sent in proactively, as well – if you have a patient who it particularly frail or at high risk of hospitalization, or if you are making a referral to the Emergency Department, faxing in a summary proactively ensures that when your patient is admitted, their Most Responsible Physician in hospital already has your important longitudinal patient information at their fingertips.

Victoria and South Island family physicians participated in a pilot project that accomplished the following:

• Over 10,500 patient summaries submitted since July 2018
• An average of 90 physicians sending in patient summaries per month
• The ability to send summaries in proactively for high-risk patients or patients referred to the Emergency Department, without the need for an admission record
• Work to complete the creation of easy-to-download, standardized patient summary templates for each EMR, helping to promote consistency and improve efficiencies

You can view the poster presentation or the article featured in BMJ Innovations for more details about the patient summaries project, presented in 2019.