Project Summary
Care coordination for surgical patients often becomes fragmented as patients move between different healthcare providers and healthcare settings. Patients and their caregivers frequently complain that they don’t feel prepared or know what to expect during these types of care transitions before and after surgery, leading to dissatisfaction with care and poor clinical outcomes. To study how surgical care coordination during transitions can be improved from the patient and caregiver perspective, we established a group of patients, researchers, and healthcare stakeholders known as the Utah-Intermountain Partnership to Improve Surgical Care transitions (U-IMPACT).
During the Tier I and Tier II P2P Award periods, U-IMPACT has engaged a diverse population of surgical patients, caregivers, and different healthcare providers throughout the Intermountain West and used their experiences to explore where major problems in surgical care coordination exist. This has led to a number of important questions related to surgical care coordination that our partnership feels should be developed into comparative effectiveness research (CER) projects. During the Tier III P2P project, U-IMPACT will work with its stakeholder groups to select high-priority CER questions that can be developed into research proposals for extramural funding. In addition, we will continue to develop partnerships that will provide the necessary research infrastructure and expertise to undertake future CER studies. These activities will allow U-IMPACT to work toward its goal of determining which interventions are most effective at improving care coordination for patients during transitions of surgical care.