When health care workers feel like they have too much to do and too little time to do it, they’re likely to agree that patient information could get lost in the shuffle.

A recent survey by Mark E. Patterson, assistant professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Pharmacy, found that hospital staff members who believed their hospital was doing too much too quickly were 1.6 times more likely to perceive problems in exchanging patient information across hospital units.

The survey, published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, urges hospitals “to implement workflow strategies that prevent information gaps from undermining patient safety.”

Patterson said the work pace at hospitals is in “crisis mode,” making even the simplest exchanges of information difficult at times. “We have a problem giving lab results even to our colleagues down the hall,” he said.

“It’s a big deal with big implications,” he said. “With the emphasis on electronic health records for research, if we can’t get information transferred right, it’s a problem.”

Patterson’s survey, which he co-authored with Miller S. Bogart, UMKC PharmD candidate 2015, and Kathleen R. Starr, PhD, was based on self-reported data in the 2010 Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture from more than 247,000 staff members from 884 hospitals.

“Given that information gaps are associated with patient handoff errors, and that patient handoff errors are associated with adverse events,” the study concludes, “an urgent need exists to implement information exchange systems that prevent information gaps from harming patients.”