Impact of a Palliative Care Checklist on Clinical Documentation

Purpose:Checklists are used in many different settings for the purpose of standardization and reduction of preventable errors in practice. Our group sought to determine whether a palliative care checklist(PCC) would improve the clinical documentation of key patient information.Methods:An initial review of 110 randomly selected medical records dictatedby 10 physicians was performed. The authors identified portions of the dictated medical recordsthat were included regularly, as well as those that were frequently missed. A PCC was drafted after final approval was obtained from the 13 faculty members. Dictationsfrom 13 clinical faculties in the supportive care center were reviewed. A χ2 test or Fisher’s exact testwas applied to assess the difference in overall checked rates before and after checklistuse. A paired t test was used to examine the difference in the average complete rateand checked rates before and after checklistuse.Results:There were improvements in the documentation before and after the...