DDHA 9901 Week 3 Problem Statement Example

Taking the Platform Out of the Problem: A Problem Statement on Discharge Summaries Reaching Outside Practices, Rewritten Without the Remedy It Arrived With

Student Name

Walden University

DDHA 9901: Practice-Based Problem Identification

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Taking the Platform Out of the Problem: A Problem Statement on Discharge Summaries Reaching Outside Practices, Rewritten Without the Remedy It Arrived With

The Problem as the Organization States It

In a planning document circulated last spring, Larchmont Health's transitions committee wrote: "Larchmont needs a care transitions platform that automatically sends discharge summaries to every referring practice." The sentence identifies a real concern, but it is written as a purchase. A reader who asks what would remain if the platform were never bought has nothing to work with.

The Solution Words in That Sentence

Three phrases carry a remedy rather than a condition.

"Needs a care transitions platform" names a product. The condition it was meant to remedy is that outside practices do not receive summaries in time; the platform is one possible answer, and the sentence assumes it is the answer.

"Automatically sends" names a mechanism. It assumes the failure is that summaries are not sent automatically. In fact, the record system already sends a summary automatically when the hospitalist signs it, provided the patient's primary care clinician is recorded correctly. The phrase hides the possibility that the failure lies in the registration field or in practices without a secure address, which a new platform would not fix.

"Every referring practice" names a scope. It assumes all practices are affected equally. Employed practices on the system's own record see the summary immediately, so the condition applies only to practices outside that record.

The Rewritten Statement

Among adults discharged home from the medical services of a two-hospital nonprofit health system whose primary care clinicians practice outside the system's electronic record, most discharge summaries had not reached the primary care clinician by the time of the patient's first follow-up visit during the six months from March through August 2026, leaving clinicians to see recently hospitalized patients without the hospital's account of diagnoses, medication changes and pending results.

What Each Part of the Statement Does

The affected group is defined by where the patient's primary care clinician practices, because that is where the condition occurs. The behavior going wrong is measurable: whether a summary reached the clinician before the first follow-up visit, which can be checked against the secure message log, the fax log and scheduling records. The setting is described by type. The period is fixed to six months so that the claim can be tested against a defined body of records.

The consequence clause names what is lost, because the reason the summary matters is its content. Kripalani et al. (2007) found that missing discharge information affected follow-up care, and Were et al. (2009) found that summaries often failed to document pending test results, which are precisely what a clinician needs at the first visit.

What Would Remain Without the Platform

Read without its remedy, the problem leaves the cause open. The summary could fail to reach a practice because the primary care field in registration is blank or wrong, because the practice has no secure address and the fax fails, because the summary is signed after the follow-up visit or because the practice receives it but cannot find it in its inbox. Each would call for a different response, and only some would be fixed by a new platform. Hoyer et al. (2016) linked delays in completing summaries to readmissions, but the early look at Larchmont's data suggests completion is not the main issue, which is exactly the kind of finding a remedy-first statement would have missed.

What the Statement Does Not Do

It does not say why summaries fail to arrive, which is for the evidence to show. It does not propose a solution. And it does not claim the condition affects employed practices, because the evidence so far says it does not.

References

Hoyer, E. H., Odonkor, C. A., Bhatia, S. N., Leung, C., Deutschendorf, A., & Brotman, D. J. (2016). Association between days to complete inpatient discharge summaries with all-payer hospital readmissions in Maryland. Journal of Hospital Medicine, 11(6), 393-400. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhm.2556

Kripalani, S., LeFevre, F., Phillips, C. O., Williams, M. V., Basaviah, P., & Baker, D. W. (2007). Deficits in communication and information transfer between hospital-based and primary care physicians: Implications for patient safety and continuity of care. JAMA, 297(8), 831-841. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.297.8.831

Were, M. C., Li, X., Kesterson, J., Cadwallader, J., Asirwa, C., Khan, B., & Rosenman, M. B. (2009). Adequacy of hospital discharge summaries in documenting tests with pending results and outpatient follow-up providers. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 24(9), 1002-1006. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-009-1057-y