> As an example: in a hospital, we have the "sign out sheet" which is a list of the current patients and all of their important data.
This. Seriously, the Institute of Medicine has implicitly decided that this is the problem that it wants the world's entrepreneurs to solve.
The IOM observed that there were many errors made in medicine. Errors in medicine harm and kill people.
Many people believe that doctors (residents) who sleep too little are more liable to commit errors. They believe that a lack of sleep is dangerous to patients; therefore, the ACGME instituted duty hour restrictions on residents.
As a consequence of this, residents work for fewer consecutive hours. Necessarily, they "hand off" their patients to one another more frequently than they did in the past. As you can imagine, there is also risk in the handoff process.
The IOM and the ACGME, via their pronouncements and policies, have decided that long shifts are too dangerous to try to solve. Instead, they are willing to throw all of their eggs into the "handoffs must be safer than long shifts" basket. Handoffs are dangerous, hard, annoying, and they happen at least twice per shift per attending, resident, and midlevel provider every day. I don't mean to tell you how to solve handoff problems, but I do want to underscore the problem that kyro has identified.