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Winter 2009: Surgical Checklists |
Winter 2009 | In This Issue
| | Message from the CEO At the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) National Forum, Atul Gawande, MD and IHI President/CEO Don Berwick issued a challenge: adopt Sign In, Time Out, and Sign Out surgical checklists within 90 days. The timing is right. A World Health Organization (WHO) study led by Gawande just published in the New England Journal of Medicine concludes that a checklist designed to improve team communication and consistency of care reduces complications and deaths associated with surgery. Meanwhile, the Joint Commission's updated Universal Protocol effective January 1, 2009, requires that hospitals meet an explicit set of expectations including pre-procedure verification, site marking, and Time Out. The WHO Safe Surgery Checklist, correctly implemented, provides hospitals with an effective approach for meeting these new requirements. Not surprisingly hospitals are increasingly turning to LiveData OR-Dashboard™ and the Patient-Aware OR™, delivered in collaboration with our industry partner KARL STORZ, for real-time tools like the electronic checklist to manage compliance with the new regulations. As we've already done at leading institutions, we're looking forward to putting the checklist into effective and affordable practice at your hospital. | | CEO's Message | | | | | | | Website Quicklinks | | | | | | Healthcare Pages | | | Featured Topic: Facilitating Time Outs
By Gabriel Spitz ScD, LiveData Director of Human Factors 
With the Joint Commission’s updated Universal Protocol comes the inevitable set of questions as to how best to ensure compliance. Some have suggested disciplinary measures as a solution. This is certainly one strategy; however such measures hardly seem appropriate for the nurses, surgeons, and other clinicians we’ve observed in operating rooms. Given the commitment and dedication of OR professionals, we are among those who believe that the remedy for careless or overly hasty Time Outs is removing the inconvenience and difficulties often associated with implementing guidelines. Helpful practices for improving the quality and consistency of Time Out performances are: - Including a Time Out checklist—presented when appropriate and visible to the entire team
- Making sure that all checklist items are applicable (for example, to a surgical specialty)
- Making it easy to access relevant information on the patient and procedure
- Making the Time Out engaging enough to draw in the entire clinical team
- Providing immediate feedback on how the Time Out was performed
LiveData OR-Dashboard is designed to deliver all the above. Since its inception, the OR-Dashboard has included a “Briefing panel” especially dedicated to assisting the OR team with the Sign In and Time Out as well as a “Closing panel” which includes information related to the Sign Out. Defining and refining safe surgery electronic checklists in collaboration with individual hospitals and the WHO team has become ongoing work at LiveData. As customers show increasing interest in using LiveData OR-Dashboard to improve their safety practices, we continue to add real-time tools that assist hospitals in meeting SCIP, Joint Commission, and CMS requirements. | | Conference Update AORN 56th Congress
AORN visitors can learn about LiveData OR-Dashboard and the Patient-Aware OR at both LiveData Booth 917 and KARL STORZ at Booth 844 from March 14–19. Combining KARL STORZ OR1® and LiveData OR-Dashboard, the Patient-Aware OR delivers critical case information to the OR team precisely when needed before, during, and after the surgical procedure for best safety practices. HIMSS09 Annual Conference
This spring LiveData will be very active at HIMSS, participating in the IHE Interoperability Showcase and the Microsoft Healthcare User Group Tech Forum as well as exhibiting at Booth 538 throughout the event. Preview upcoming activities… | | LiveData Milestones New Installations
The new Patient-Aware OR is generating a great deal of interest among current and prospective KARL STORZ hospitals. A number of them, including hospitals ranked in the U.S. News Honor Roll, have already opted to purchase LiveData OR-Dashboard. Announcements soon to follow. New OR-Dashboard Features
LiveData is developing a Printed Confirmation of Pathology Result Review feature for LiveData OR-Dashboard. It comes as an extension of the existing pathology functionality, in which data on specimen status from the pathology lab is displayed in real-time on the OR-Dashboard. Reports will be automatically printed out each time the OR views pathology results—showing exactly what specimens and results were displayed, patient name, MRN, and time (when specimen sent, when result posted). LiveData is integrating Microsoft Silverlight into LiveData OR-Dashboard. The new functionality will provide a sophisticated level of flexibility, enabling hospital IT departments to configure the dashboard’s user interface to meet individual hospital requirements. In conjunction with KARL STORZ A/V integration, Silverlight allows a single OR-Dashboard display to show both data and video in context, enabling surgeons to check in on their ORs remotely. Advances in Standardizing Technology
With a $730,000 SBIR grant awarded from the U.S. Army Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC), LiveData has begun Phase II development of an integrated clinical environment with CIMIT’s Medical Device Plug-and-Play (MD PnP) team. LiveData is currently focused on developing a workflow alert manager and IT extensible user interface for the OR-Dashboard patient safety system. Following last year’s success, LiveData OR-Dashboard is once again undergoing interoperability testing with other systems and devices in the Patient Care Domain at the IHE North American Connectathon (February 23–27). This year LiveData will submit Alarm Communications Manager transactions for testing with IHE standards. The Connectathon also serves as a prerequisite for inclusion in the HIMSS09 Interoperability Showcase. |
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