- From Anesthesiology’s July issue, an editorial by Abouleish on improving operating room throughput, accompanying a successful case study by Smith of such an improvement on joint arthroplasty surgeries. The key ingredients are parallelizing turnover tasks and using regional anesthesia. I like process improvement studies, and this may be a future classic. However, the benefits are dependent on a well-trained team with significant experience working together, and patients with few comorbidities.
- The upcoming JAMIA article Workarounds to Barcode Medication Administration Systems: Their Occurrences, Causes, and Threats to Patient Safety by Koppel, Wetterneck, Telles, and Karsh is worth reading. Through a rigorous process observation approach, they cataloged the major reasons why staff overrode alerts from barcoded medication administration system for 10.3% of all medications. (Thanks to MedInformaticsMD for the tip.)
- Chris Pearson’s image formatting advice helped me figure out how to make the RSS feed look good in readers such as Google Reader. (Chris Pearson is the original author of Cutline, the Wordpress theme used on this blog.)
Image Credit: Wisconsin Historical Society at Flickr.
Tags: anesthesia · barcode · errors · jamia · process · wordpress1 Comment
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In a study conducted at the Massachusetts General Hospital “OR of the Future” site, it was determined that such parallel processing supports a significant capacity / throughput enhancement. The margin of the additional case volume offset the added expense of parallel processing.
Where hospital OR capacity is constrained, this is an excellent way to increase capacity while improving physician service.