Using Visual Analytics to Determine the Utilization of Preoperative Anesthesia Assessments

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Health Services Research
• Clinical Workflow Analysis

Background:

• Preoperative assessments are crucial for anesthetic care.
• Utilization by non-anesthesia teams remains poorly understood.
• Perioperative workflow restructuring necessitates understanding documentation use.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the utilization of preoperative anesthesia assessments by non-anesthesia personnel.
• To identify patterns of access and user roles for these documents.
• To inform perioperative workflow improvements through data visualization.

Main Methods:

• Electronic medical record audit log data was analyzed over 140 days.
• Accesses to preoperative anesthesia assessment documents were queried.
• User roles were categorized, and descriptive statistics/visualizations were generated using R.

Main Results:

• Over 73,000 accesses to preoperative anesthesia assessments were recorded.
• Assessments from the clinic were accessed more than those from the day of surgery.
• Diverse users, including researchers and attendings, accessed historical documents.

Conclusions:

• Data visualization identified novel utilization patterns by various clinical staff.
• Understanding documentation dependencies aids in optimizing perioperative workflows.
• This visual analytic approach is applicable to diverse clinical documentation contexts.