Secondary analysis of hand-offs in internal medicine using the I-PASS mnemonic.

The mnemonic I-PASS (Illness severity, Patient summary, Actions list, Situation awareness, Synthesis) has been shown to improve communication between providers during handoffs. This simulation study compared usual resident handoffs to "gold standard" I-PASS handoffs, focusing on relevance of information, completeness, and distribution of the first four I-PASS categories (synthesis was not measured as part of this study). Relevance and completeness rates were 37% and 52%, respectively. More than half of the handoffs did not include Situation Awareness, and the most common order of categories was Patient, Illness severity, Actions list.