The Problem
The operating room (OR) is a data, cost, and clinically-intensive environment where patient safety is paramount. It is also a fixed, limited resource critical to delivering patient care. Optimizing patient safety while maintaining throughput to ensure timely delivery of care requires effective communication in the OR between key stakeholders.Coordination between members of the clinical team and support staff in the OR is necessary to ensure delivery of safe and efficient peri/intraoperative care. Ideally, this communication would involve a semi-structured conference – or “huddle” – at the start of each day where all parties could be present to discuss case-specific needs, concerns, and current resource limitations. However, given the diverse groups involved, including nursing, sterile processing, anesthesia, pharmacy, and surgeons, this has proven logistically challenging to achieve consistently. In turn, information loss as a result of ineffective communication leads to potential delays in care, longer turnover times and, worst of all, patient safety concerns while adding unneeded tension to an already stressful environment. Given the surgical volume at Duke University Health System, with over 70,000 operations completed last year, issues stemming from ineffective communication have the ability to rapidly compound.
Our Solution
In lieu of current inconsistently-implemented verbal “huddles”, each OR will have a corresponding virtual meeting place (the Virtual Operating Room Hub or VORH) in which all staff and providers assigned to that room can communicate any special equipment needs, specific patient concerns, status updates, and critical information in real-time for elective cases. Support services would also ideally have access to the VORH to share any patient/case-specific concerns related to their specific domain (e.g. sterile processing communicating about equipment availability).
Improving timely and accurate OR communication would allow all team members to be aware of patient-related concerns, reduce wasted supplies, increase OR turnover efficiency, and improve patient safety while simultaneously improving care-team morale.
