Anesthesia risk alerts significantly reduce adverse events in 5 patient scenarios

Editor's Note

North American Partners in Anesthesia’s (NAPA) Anesthesia Risk Alerts (ARA) program provides anesthesia clinicians with novel mitigation strategies to better manage five high-risk scenarios in the perioperative setting. 

Implemented in April 2019, NAPA’s nationwide healthcare partners have achieved 95% compliance screening for the scenarios and have performed secondary risk mitigation strategies if warranted, resulting in a significant decrease in adverse event occurrence. 

The five scenarios were identified through examination of adverse events reported in clinical outcomes data from approximately 6 million patients over a two-year period. The ARA seeks to reduce patient harm through dual process decision-making, cognitive debiasing, red team/blue team methodology, and practice guidelines from national medical societies. 

The five high-risk scenarios include: 

• Known/suspected difficult airway 
• Patients with a body mass index greater than or equal to 45 
• American Society of Anesthesiologists status 4 or 5 
• Pulmonary hypertension 
• Populations of patients at risk for operating room fire. 

Among the benefits of the program are a stronger culture of safety, better communication and collaboration between medical staff and departments, and greater awareness of these threats among perioperative teams. 

NAPA was recently awarded the 2022 John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Awards National Level Innovation by The Joint Commission and National Quality Forum for the program.