Ambient intelligence platforms and new frontiers in surgical safety

The operating room is a high-risk, high-entropy environment, prone to human error and preventable adverse events. Drawing on lessons from high-reliability organizations such as the aviation industry, Aimbient (formerly Operating Room Black Box by Surgical Safety Technologies, New York, NY) collects continuous, multimodal audiovisual and physiologic data capture to deepen our understanding of surgical safety. This platform has demonstrated improvements in patient safety domains across several metrics, including ground-truth benchmarking of checklist adherence, video-based multidisciplinary review conferences, and automated physiologic event tagging. Recent integration of key postoperative morbidity and mortality metrics into the data streams collected by Aimbient monitoring platforms allows for us to achieve a holistic understanding of the perioperative record. As artificial intelligence capabilities rapidly expand and begin to integrate into our health care systems, ambient data capture is uniquely poised to generate real-time insights and open new frontiers in surgical patient safety.