A Continuum of Interfaces to Engage Surgical Staff in Efficient Collaboration

Large hospital surgical suites must combine high quality of care with an efficient management of operations. However, the diversity of procedures, staff, and patients present important challenges for staff collaboration. The complexity of flows between tasks and places, such as interconnections between pre-operation, post-operation and intensive care units, led previous research to address these issues separately using checklists, scheduling, or specialized human-computer interfaces. Approaches to treat the surgical suite as a whole entity have not been explored yet. Here, we build upon a cyber-physical system comprising an electronic whiteboard and different sensors tracking the status of operating rooms to design a continuum of mobile and fixed, shared computer interfaces. The interfaces disseminate the information through different locations and devices and allow for its manipulation in order to foster appropriate collaboration on unforeseen events and decisions. We present our design rationale process, involving the different surgical suite users and stakeholders and report on the architecture of the system.