Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jan 20, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 23, 2019 - Feb 27, 2019
Date Accepted: Mar 7, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Increasing Completion Rate and Benefits of Checklists: Prospective Evaluation of Surgical Safety Checklists with Smart Glasses
ABSTRACT
Background:
Studies have demonstrated that Surgical Safety Checklists (SSCs) can significantly reduce surgical complications and mortality rates. Such lists rely on traditional posters or hardcopy paper, and their contents are generic regardless the type of surgery being performed. SSC completion rates and uniformity of content have been reported as modest and widely variable.
Objective:
This study aims to investigate the feasibility and potential of using smart glasses in the operating room to increase the benefits of surgical safety checklists (SSCs) by improving usability through contextualized content and, ideally, resulting in improved completion rates.
Methods:
We prospectively evaluated and compared 80 pre-operative time-out events with surgical safety checklists at a major academic medical center between June 2016 and February 2017. Participants were assigned to either a conventional checklist approach (poster, memory, or both) or a smart glasses application running on Google Glass.
Results:
Four different surgeons conducted forty-one checklists using convectional methods (i.e., memory or poster) and thirty-nine using the smart glasses application. The average checklist completion rate using conventional methods was 76%. Smart glasses allowed a completion rate of up to 100% with a decrease in checklist duration of 18%.
Conclusions:
Compared with alternatives, such as posters, paper, and memory, smart glasses checklists are easier to use and follow. The glasses allowed surgeons to use contextualized time-out checklists, which increased the completion rate to 100% and reduced the checklist execution time and time required to prepare the equipment during surgical cases. Clinical Trial: Protocol ID 29481, IRB ID 351
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