Use of electronically mediated time out to reduce wrong surgery

Editor's Note

Implementation of a forced-completion electronically mediated time out to minimize the rate of wrong surgery is feasible, but its effect on wrong surgery is unclear, finds this study.

Researchers created an electronic system using intraoperative electronic documentation to present a time-out checklist on large in-room displays. Time out was dynamically interposed as a forced-function documentation step between “patient in operating room” and “incision.”

Surgeons performed 243,939 procedures over 5 years using the system with zero wrong surgeries, compared with 253,838 procedures over 6 years with 2 wrong surgeries before implementation of the system. Analysis suggests an 84% probability that the postimplementation rate is lower than baseline, the authors say.

An Interventional Observational Study