Someone has developed “black boxes” for the OR. Black boxes, also known as flight data recorders, have been used to collect information from aircrafts for decades. It’s a series of machines that records everything that happens on an aircraft. The black box logs every time the pilots push a button or flip a switch. When a plane crashes, finding its black box is imperative for the airline. It can tell them why the plane crashed and help them avoid that error in the future.
Surgical Safety Technologies Inc. based out of Toronto has made a kind of black box for operating rooms. It records data from all the medical monitoring equipment in the room and creates audio and video recordings. It monitors everything that happens in the operating room, 24 hours a day. The purpose of the tool, aptly named the OR Black Box, is to help operating rooms build systems that make them more efficient and reduce mistakes.
Such technology could be incredibly helpful in medical malpractice claims. We’ve done numerous cases that involve surgical errors in the operating room. The notes that healthcare professionals make after surgeries can be vague and it can be difficult to figure out what actually happened. If we had access to the OR Black Box data, there would be no guesswork. We would know exactly what happened during a surgery.
Unfortunately, many healthcare professionals are dubious of the OR Black Boxes for that very reason. They don’t want their errors recorded and used in a lawsuit. Because of this, Surgical Safety Technologies Inc. are doing what they can to make it impossible for the data the OR Black Box collects to be useful for a medical malpractice claim. In the video recording, all faces are blurred and all bodies are altered to provide anonymity to patients and healthcare professionals, and all data the OR Black Box collects is deleted after one month. This makes finding a recording of a surgery for a specific patient before the black box deletes it incredibly difficult.
However, whether or not OR Black Boxes can be used in medical malpractice claims is inconsequential if the technology can actually make operating rooms safer. If it can do that, then that’s all that really matters.
