3 Ways Hospitals Can Improve Surgical Training Through Technology

Providing opportunities for feedback

Clinical observation and a large volume of evidence suggest wide variation in the technical quality and skill among surgeons. That’s due, in some measure, to a lack of continuing education, a key component of which is peer interaction. For example, surgeons who engage in higher levels of peer interaction have a higher likelihood of passing a maintenance of certification examination, and higher scores, according to a 2014 study of 568 surgeons published in JAMA Surgery.

Certainly, surgeons have the potential to improve much faster after their formal training with both purposeful practice and meaningful feedback, best delivered through peer interaction. The problem is that surgeons rarely watch one another operate and generally have no source of feedback on how they can improve once they’ve completed training. That is changing, though. As a result of the evolution of surgical practice toward videoscopic and robotic surgery, surgeons have new opportunities to obtain practice and feedback in more impactful ways than ever before.

Following the digital trail

Thanks to the “digital trail” of data from such surgeries, advances in technology and analytics have created opportunities for evaluating surgeons’ techniques. The digital trail includes realtime information on a patient’s history, vital signs, imaging and other parameters. It’s also increasingly feasible to collect and synthesize information from surgical instruments
and clinical workflows to drive surgical performance. Akin to the black box in aviation, the digital trail records everything (video, conversations, data, images, etc.). Through analyzing
such data, surgeons can find the root causes for the complications that put a patient and hospital at risk.

Looking beyond surgeons

Leveraging data and performance-focused analytics offer the potential to improve all aspects of a surgical team’s performance, including operating staff members – critical, given that studies show operating room time costs well in excess of $1,000 per hour. Establishing a culture of safety and quality among staff can be challenging due to high rates of turnover, which create knowledge gaps throughout a system.

However, the digital trail of data from surgeries also informs OR staff members and helps them improve performance through training modules and checklists of best practices. The
recordings and data can be used to create these training modules, which are more than just simulations, but real patients under actual conditions.

Even small improvements in the process efficiency of surgery staff members have the potential to deliver a disproportionate impact on surgical quality, which can enhance hospitals’ financial performance in value-based reimbursement models.