Dynamic Pocket Card for Implementing ISBAR in Shift Handover Communication.

A risk factor for patient safety are communication failures among health professionals. Communication standards such as SBAR or ISBAR (situation, background, assessment, recommendation) aim at improving the exchange of information between health professionals by specifying a certain structure and content of information. However, those tools are not well established in daily clinical practice and IT support is missing which results in unstructured, inefficient and error prone information exchange. In this paper, we address this issue by presenting a mobile application that implements the ISBAR communication standard for the intensive care unit (ICU). The system can serve as digital pocket card supporting nurses in preparation for reporting and in a structured information provision during shift handover and in daily reporting. We collected requirements in collaboration with a hospital and developed a prototype. Within the application, nurses can take notes on the five information categories of ISBAR, which allows to reproduce the information in reporting situations in a structured manner. In future, it will be assessed in a pilot phase whether the digital pocket card is suitable for everyday clinical use.