Developing strategies for implementation and use of the Operating Room Black Box

Project Summary It is estimated that fixing problems related to preventable errors costs the U.S. healthcare system $400 billion annually. In the field of surgery, the most basic element of quality care begins in the operating room (OR), and >50% of preventable errors that lead to patient harm happen there. The suboptimal performance of OR teams

often lead to adverse events such as wrong site surgery, foreign object retention, and delays that greatly increase morbidity, mortality, and costs. Though using a surgical safety checklist can prevent errors and reduce patient harm, measurement of improve critical intraoperative processes has traditionally required putting

observers inside the OR to record and analyze team performance. Since this process is labor-intensive and costly, it has been limited to a few large academic centers conducting funded research in quality improvement. The operating room Black Box® (ORBB) is an innovative technological and analytical platform, that

synchronously captures the performance of the operating surgeon and the OR team while simultaneously recording patients’ vitals and postoperative outcomes. The ORBB uses machine learning to analyze performance and outcomes, making the program scalable and unlocking the potential for widespread monitoring and improvement of intraoperative team performance. However, large-scale adoption of the ORBB

is limited by a lack of training programs that incorporate the data into an actionable form and by the absence of high-quality data on how to implement the ORBB in diverse hospitals. We hypothesize that addressing these barriers will lead to significant improvement in outcomes for surgical patients and propose three specific aims

to test these hypotheses. In aim 1, a high fidelity immersive multi-player virtual simulator will be developed for training the OR teams in performing the surgical safety checklist. In aim 2, the validity and effectiveness of the virtual simulator in improving the quality of safety will be studied using the ORBB data.

In aim 3, a study of ORBB implementation will be conducted to identify barriers and facilitators to adoption of the ORBB across the US healthcare system.