Incongruence of Patient Problem Information Across Three Phases of Home Care Admission: There's a Problem with the Problem List.

In home health care, the patient problem list is an important component of the admission and care planning processes and determines the subsequent care received. We examined the information received from the referring facilities and its relationship with the final patient problem list generated at home health care admission. Researchers observed 12 admissions and collected available documents related to the admission and care planning process. Problems identified in documents provided to admission nurses (input documents) and in documents subsequently created by those nurses (output documents) were coded to form a standardized set of problem terms across the documents. Documents available, distribution of problems within the documents, and concordance between input and output documents were assessed. A varying number of the 17 unique problems found across the documents were distributed by document type. Patients were referred to home health care with more clinical problems than were documented in the output documents.