Perioperative Readiness Information Management Environment

Accurate patient information is perhaps the most important requirement for the delivery of safe, coordinated and comprehensive care by members of the health care system. This is especially true of the complex and high-risk perioperative process where the consequences of compromised patient safety can be severe. To help avoid errors, the entire team must share the same awareness of the situation and the information must be accessible at will in order to see trends and make predictions. There is a need for an integrated perioperative support system for delivering the best possible care to patients, thereby reducing errors and increasing patient safety. A human factors and risk analysis approach to identify safer clinical processes can inform the design of a perioperative information support system. To achieve this goal we will design and develop PRIME, a web-enabled, model-based Perioperative Readiness Information Management Environment. In the base period we will identify the normative model of information flow in the perioperative process and identify vulnerabilities in the network that would most benefit from a layer of decision support, and in the option period design the concept for the system.