Gestalt operating room display design for perioperative team situation awareness

The perioperative environment is a complex, high risk environment that requires real-time coordination by all perioperative team members and accurate, up-to-date information for situation assessment and decision-making. There is the need for a "Gestalt" holistic awareness of the perioperative environment to enable synthesis and contextualization of the salient information such as: patient information, case and procedure information, staff information, operative site view, physiological data, resource availability. One potential approach is to augment the medical toolkit with a large screen wall display that integrates and makes accessible information that currently resides in different data systems and care providers. The objectives are to promote safe workflows, team coordination and communication, and to enable diagnosis, anticipation of events, and information flow from upstream to downstream care providers. We used the human factors engineering design process to design and develop a display that provides a common operational picture for shared virtual perioperative team situation awareness to enhance patient safety.