BACKGROUND:

Outpatient providers often do not receive discharge summaries from acute care providers prior to follow-up visits. These outpatient providers may use the after-visit summaries (AVS) that are given to patients to obtain clinical information. It is unclear how effectively AVS support care coordination between clinicians.

OBJECTIVES:

Goals for this effort include: (1) developing usability heuristics that may be applied both for assessment and to guide generation of medical documents in general, (2) conducting a heuristic evaluation to assess the use of AVS for communication between clinicians, and (3) providing recommendations for generating AVS that effectively support both patient/caregiver use and care coordination.