University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics

Challenge

“Technical and teamwork skills are two necessary components of success in the operating room. One of the biggest challenges for hospitals is getting highly granular and useful data from the operating room to drive clinical improvements. The University of Iowa needed innovative tools to help address all the of areas critical to meeting the clinical, regulatory, and financial demands in this space.” – Dr John Cromwell, Clinical Professor of Surgery-Gastrointestinal, Minimally invasive and Bariatric Surgery

Solution

The University of Iowa leveraged the Caresyntax Data-Driven Surgery Platform to create a High-Fidelity Surgical Record™ based on rich surgical video and analytics to drive clinical, operational, and financial improvements in Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy and Sleeve Gastrectomy procedures. Caresyntax provided OR automation to enable seamless recording of endoscopic video, in-room video, and upload of that video to the cloud for post procedural Video Based Assessments of Surgical Skills and Team Dynamics within a protected Patient Safety Organization.

How We Helped

• A quick and efficient workflow was developed to capture surgical video and automatically upload the video to the Caresyntax cloud for assessments of surgical and team-based skills decreasing the overall process of capturing and uploading video by 90 minutes.
• Surgeons and clinical leaders were sent a link to the surgical video which leads directly to the Video Based Assessment (VBA) within the Caresyntax Platform.
• Surgeons completed OSATS assessments of surgical cases to identify procedural variability and provide feedback on technical surgical skills.
• Clinical staff reviewed operating room video to identify exemplar teamwork performance and to identify potential areas of improvement related to team dynamics and strategic clinical initiatives.
• Caresyntax’s Patient Safety Organization (PSO) designation protects all the videos and assessments from legal discovery and provides surgeons and surgical teams the opportunity to learn and improve through VBA.