Digital workflows and surgical performance
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Digital surgical workflows and surgical performance: A feasibility study.
IRAS ID
265049
Contact name
Manish Chand
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Digital Surgery
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 30 months, 0 days
Research summary
Over 300 million surgical operations are performed annually worldwide to meet the global burden of disease. Variations can occur in surgical performance, delivery and approach, which can result in potentially avoidable errors and complications. Innovations in effective and efficient surgical team performance are required to meet the growing demand in both the volume of operations and the training needs of theatre staff-advances in digital technologies have the potential to meet this need.
Digital Surgery™ has developed a digital system that encompasses all aspects of the surgical pathway. It’s based on a central digital architecture, which can support consistent surgical practice and assists in the standardisation of procedures through process mapping and data analysis. The digital tools are designed to support surgeons and surgical teams in training and in preparation for surgery, streamlining team coordination, efficiency during surgery and surgeon and team analytics postoperatively.
Digital Surgery supports the creation of surgeon-specific or patient-specific procedural workflows for surgeons and scrub teams that can be used for preoperative rehearsal. During the operation, workflows are shown on multiple visual display units, with separate content visible for the operating and scrub teams, to support staff through the procedural steps and equipment required for the case. The platform includes encrypted computing equipment that records the operation, performs automatic analysis of the procedural steps to drive the displays during the operation and uploads the anonymised surgical video through a secure web-platform.
This 30-month feasibility study will create procedural workflows for the surgeon, assistant and scrub team for key-hole abdominal surgery at University College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH). We will prospectively collect data including qualitative electronic questionnaires (distributed using Survey Monkey), theatre metrics, anonymised clinical data and anonymised surgical video to investigate whether the effectiveness and efficiency of surgical teams have changed following the implementation of Digital Surgery at UCLH.
REC name
London - Riverside Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
19/LO/1368
Date of REC Opinion
16 Oct 2019
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion