’Black box’ for OR aims to identify errors

Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto have developed a “black box” for use in operating rooms, similar to that used in the airline industry. The goal is to improve patient safety and outcomes by identifying where errors occur in the OR and teaching surgeons how to prevent them. The box is about the size of a box of tissues or a thick book. It records almost everything that goes on in the OR, such as video of the surgical procedure, conversations among healthcare workers, room temperature, and decibel levels. It works only for laparoscopic, or minimally invasive, surgeries that insert video cameras in thin plastic tubes into small incisions in the body that allow the surgeon to see what’s going on inside the patient.

Source: HealthData Management