About The Study

There is an urgent need to characterize implementation strategies suitable for use in the fast-paced, high-stakes environment of critical care; doing so would generate a substantial public health impact by narrowing the evidence-to-practice performance gap for these high-acuity patients. One such gap is caused by inconsistent adoption of standardized post-surgical handoffs in U.S. hospitals, an intervention deemed high priority by the American Heart Association. In this project, we use an evidence-based standardized protocol for patient care handoffs from the operating room (OR) to the intensive care unit (ICU) as a model to study the uptake and use of complex socio-technical interventions in acute care. 

In previous work, our group demonstrated adoption, fidelity, and improvement in process outcomes in a pilot 

2-site study of OR-to-ICU handoff standardization. Our published work in this area builds on a base of more than 65 published studies demonstrating the effectiveness of handoffs protocols on a range of outcomes relevant to the care of patients with cardiopulmonary failure, including process, provider, and patient outcomes. The proposed study is an extension of our work that will address critical knowledge gaps about implementation in acute care by studying the implementation of a standardized handoff protocol in 12 adult and pediatric ICUs in nine hospitals in five health systems.