When East Cooper Medical Center in Mt. Pleasant, S.C. moves into its new 140-bed hospital in April, it will roll out new technology in its eight operating rooms to provide a real-time information dashboard style for everyone to see at the same time.

Kim Hardwick, director of surgical services, calls it “the latest and greatest technology for real-time flow of information in the operating room.”

The large screen makes the same information available to everyone on the team. The nurses, the techs, the physician, the anesthesia team all see the same information, Hardwick said.

The technology, called Patient Aware OR, is from Cambridge, Mass.-based LiveData, which
provides the OR-Dashboard and El Segundo, Calif.-based KARL STORZ, which provides the OR-1 software.

The screen provides patient information such as anesthesia, vital signs, special equipment needs.

“Anyone in the room can look up and see what’s going on,” Hardwick said.

As Hardwick sees it, the system provides for greater patient safety.

“It really is a clear, clean view that allows for better patient safety as well as better teamwork and communication with the team,” she said. “There’s a big opportunity to improve the overall workflow as well for better efficiency.”

Today, the information in the OR is fragmented, some of it on paper charts and some of it digital.
The OR nurse sees her charting, the anesthesia team sees its charting, and the physician might have to ask a question. The information is not available for everyone to see at once.

East Cooper Medical Center is part of Tenet Healthcare Corp., headquartered in Dallas.

The integration software will be installed under the direction of Tenet’s IT organization in Dallas, and will interface with the technology installed in each of the eight operating rooms in Mt. Pleasant. LiveData has established a rapidly growing library of medical device and system interfaces, including McKesson's Horizon Surgical Manager documentation system that will be implemented at East Cooper. LiveData is working with Tenet to configure the McKesson interface for East Cooper.

"LiveData OR-Dashboard and KARL STORZ OR1 have been field-proven in large, marquee hospitals such as NewYork-Presbyterian, Massachusetts General, Johns Hopkins and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center,” said Phil Brzezinski, a vice president at LiveData.

Hospitals with five to 25 operating rooms represent the vast majority used by surgical patients, Brzezinski said, and that makes the East Cooper installation representative of the market opportunity.

The OR technology is one piece of the new technology Tenet is upgrading at East Cooper Medical Center.

 “We’re updating everything and bringing everything to the most current technology we can possibly do based on the support from our corporate offices,” said Maria de Dumenica, systems administrator. Tenet is working with Dell-Perot on technology updates throughout the hospital.

The OR technology is likely to serve as a model for other Tenet hospitals.

“They’re looking to us to be the flagship operation of this. They’re going to use us as an example, and in the future they’ll look at expanding that technology,” de Dumenica said.