Addition to Patient Safety Platform Guides Performance of Safe Surgery Checklist

CAMBRIDGE, Mass, Aug. 12, 2013 - LiveData, Inc., leader in real-time integration and display technology, today announced that Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has expanded its deployment of LiveData OR-Dashboard™, adding the revolutionary Active Time Out® (ATO) patient safety technology to automate their Safe Surgery Checklists. The Joint Commission and World Health Organization advocate using Safe Surgery Checklists to reduce preventable surgical errors. ATO has been initially deployed in two operating rooms at the new Lunder building, in the heart of MGH’s main campus in Boston. 

LiveData OR-Dashboard presents essential information about the patient and surgical case to the entire OR team on a large display, in real-time. With ATO, surgical pauses or time outs to perform safe surgery checklists are integrated into the workflow and automatically documented, supporting hospital safety and quality initiatives. 

ATO automatically displays the safety checklist in step with surgical workflow, including all relevant patient and case-specific information with each checklist item. Impossible to ignore, these electronic checklists are visible from every area of the OR. Everyone sees the same information at the right time. These features allow the surgical team to review items and record responses at the point of care without interruption. An interactive clicker is used to record the fact – and the time – that a checklist has been performed, with the information time-stamped and fed back into the electronic health record (EHR). 

In addition to the in-room real-time features, LiveData quality and efficiency reports provide retrospective performance feedback, which is critical for enabling hospitals to continually make process improvements, such as retraining noncompliant staff and ensuring checklists are performed at the right time. 

While ATO is now a standard feature of LiveData OR-Dashboard, existing customers like MGH are choosing to add it to their current installations. 

“Over the years, we have been working collaboratively with MGH to come up with a more durable checklist process that avoids ‘checklist fatigue’ and reduces unnecessary manual labor. Active Time Out helps bolster a culture of safety with emphasis on open team communication and workflow improvement,” said LiveData CEO Jeff Robbins. “Automating the Safe Surgery Checklist prompts the team and captures the engaged performance of the time out. It encourages discussion of the procedure’s game plan, and provides a means to measure success.”  

Vendor neutral and interoperable with any EHR system, OR-Dashboard integrates data from patient records, administrative systems, physiological monitors, and medical devices into an automated workflow. 

About LiveData

LiveData, Inc. (Twitter: @livedatadashbd) is a leading innovator in real-time data integration and display technology. The company’s solutions gather data from diverse sources, integrate the data with workflows, and present it as meaningful information on easy-to-read, graphic displays. Since 2006, leading medical institutions, including Massachusetts General Hospital, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, have been using LiveData to improve operating room safety and efficiency. Founded in 1991, LiveData is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For more information visit www.livedata.com.