A patient can move to the next stage of care before the information their care team needs gets there. When outside records are missing, incomplete, or difficult to track, patients and staff can end up bridging the gap themselves.
What you will take away:
- A 10-Minute Information Continuity Check you can run against a real referral or outside-record workflow to identify where information becomes difficult to own, see, complete, escalate, or deliver.
- The difference between electronic availability and operational usability, including what current federal hospital data tells us about information being available versus routinely used in care.
- Five questions every outside-information workflow should be able to answer, from who owns a missing record to whether it reached the team that actually needs it.
- How hidden workarounds can mask process gaps, especially when experienced staff are relying on inboxes, calls, memory, and individual follow-up practices to keep requests moving.
- A practical way to evaluate information continuity without another score or maturity model, using Consistent, Variable, and Unknown to identify the first issue worth addressing.
