Arya DK

2013-11-01

Writing of a 'Discharge Summary' has been an integral part of discharge from hospital or transfer of care. With the move from paper-based to electronic clinical records, is there an opportunity to eliminate the practice of 'writing' a discharge summary? One potential benefit of electronic clinical records is that they provide a facility to automate the retrieval of key information without having to re-enter, re-orientate or manually re-format the information contained in the dataset. Equally importantly, they exclude the subjective errors of commission and omission and the personal bias of the person writing a discharge summary who most often is a junior doctor, either intern or a resident. In developing the electronic clinical records systems we should endeavour to make the contextual information, the results of procedures and investigations and the plan of management automatically visible and accessible without recourse to `writing' a separate or additional discharge summary.

Chief Medical Officer, Department of Health, Northern Territory Government, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, email: Dinesh.Arya@NT.gov.au

Arya, D. (2015). Is it time to stop writing discharge summaries? Asia Pacific Journal of Health Management, 10(2), 68–73.

1833-3818

https://hdl.handle.net/10137/12035

10

Hospitals

Admission and discharge

Medical records

Medical care

Management

Is it time to stop writing discharge summaries?

Journal Article

Publication