As part of a special series on artificial intelligence (AI), OR Manager is taking a deep dive into the many facets of this new technology and its impact on patient care. Part 1 of this introduction to the series (OR Manager, May 2019, 1, 7-11) defined several different types of…

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Perioperative services departments have been slow to adopt the black boxes used in the aviation industry, partly because it can take a large team of experts hours to analyze data collected by the box. However, the team behind a surgical black box is using artificial intelligence (AI) to significantly cut…

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Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital, located in Lake Forest, Illinois, has taken a giant leap in curtailing late starts in the OR. In December 2016, the facility’s on-time start percentage was only 37%. Perioperative team members dug in their heels and, by August 2017, increased their on-time starts to 77%.…

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Artificial intelligence (AI) may be coming to your OR sooner than you think. AI is already being used to identify areas needing quality improvement by analyzing surgical workflow, communication patterns, and errors that went unnoticed during a procedure. OR leaders need to understand AI and participate in its development and…

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Sarasota Memorial Health Care System (SMH) in Sarasota, Florida, is a Level 2 trauma center with 839 beds and more than 900 physicians. The 430 members of the surgical staff perform more than 24,300 inpatient and outpatient surgical procedures in the 34 operating suites each year. With this level of…

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Editor's Note In this study, survival rates for geriatric patients were significantly improved when emergency general surgery procedures were performed at hospitals with higher operative volumes. Of 41,860 surgical procedures evaluated at 200 hospitals, mortality decreased as hospital emergency operative volume increased. For every standardized increase in volume, reduction in…

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Contaminated surgical instruments made ECRI Institute’s 2019 annual top 10 list of health technology hazards, coming in at number five: “Mishandling flexible endoscopes after disinfection can lead to patient infections.” Number two on the list in 2018 was “Endoscope reprocessing failures continue to expose patients to infection risk.” It’s not…

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Editor's Note This study from a large academic medical center finds that the practice of overlapping surgery does not expose patients to increased risk of negative outcomes. Data on operative procedures from January 1, 2014 to December 31, 2015 at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, were used to compare…

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Today’s OR directors feel tremendous pressure to turn over rooms more quickly and efficiently--every minute of OR time affects the hospital’s bottom line. To improve efficiency, OR directors are becoming more aware of the need to approach turnover practices as a process (e.g., room scheduling, room setup, room cleaning) and…

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Flipping rooms, or running two ORs back to back, is common in many perioperative services departments. Certain rules of thumb can help ensure efficiency and good outcomes, but sometimes those rules either don’t exist or are unclear. Does your facility have guidelines for overlapping surgery, and do your surgical teams…

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