LIJ Medical Center Introduces Video Monitoring in ORs

Long Island Jewish (LIJ) Medical Center, New Hyde Park, N.Y., has installed cameras in all 24 of its operating rooms, which performed nearly 20,000 surgeries in 2013, as part of a pilot project. LIJ and the North Shore-LIJ Health System's Forest Hills Hospital are the only hospitals in the country using remote video auditing (supplied by Arrowsight Inc.) in a surgical setting, according to the announcement.

Remote video auditing is designed to make sure that surgical teams take a “timeout” before they begin a procedure. The team then goes through a patient safety checklist aimed at avoiding mistakes. Each OR is monitored remotely once every two minutes to determine the live status of the procedure, and ensure that surgical teams identify and evaluate key safety measures designed to prevent “never events,” such as wrong-site surgeries and medical items inadvertently left in patients.

The cameras also are used to alert hospital cleaning crews when a surgery is nearing completion, which helps to reduce the time it takes to prepare the OR for the next case. To reduce the risk of infections, the monitoring system also confirms whether ORs have been cleaned thoroughly and properly overnight. In a matter of weeks, patient safety measures at both hospitals improved to nearly perfect scores. Additionally, all staff can see real-time OR status updates and performance feedback metrics on plasma screens throughout the OR and on smart-phone devices.