Timely and clear communication is a cornerstone of any high functioning team. It is even more so in the context of an operating room environment. In order to safely and efficiently care for patients in the OR, providers and vendors wearing different hats need to stay in-sync and on the same page continuously. There is an abundance of information everywhere: From the charting of the patient to real-time devices reporting vitals. It is imperative that you can highlight signal from noise and don't overwhelm your team.
The Leap Rail Board product is designed with this challenge in mind. Our modern visualization keeps the focus on in-flight cases and using a milestone-adjusted color coding scheme, allows different team members to have an accurate picture of the current case load at a glance. Furthermore, the news ticker on the board summarizes important and actionable updates and recommendations such that board runners and charge nurses can stay focused on signal.
Working closely with our customers, we have been able to customize the board product to fit their workflow and processes while highlighting important information for different stages of a case: from pre-op all the way to PACU and even discharge. Through this collaboration, we had noticed that sometimes important but transitional attributes of a case were being buried in notes or comments sections for different cases. These could be things like patient's allergy to latex, or fire risk assessment (FRAT) information.
We were also asked to provide ways for different teams to signal one-another in an asynchronous broadcast model. A great example of this ask was the pre-op team letting the OR know when they patient is ready for transfer or if a case can't proceed and it needs attention from the supervisor. Obviously this type of communication can be achieved through a phone call or other means but it's cumbersome, one-to-one, and not visible to the broader group.
In order to address the needs of our customers along these requests, we recently introduced the Case Labels. Case labels are light but informative tags you can associate with a case. They are defined by providing a name, initial icon, and a color. For example, you might have a yellow L for signifying the patient being allergic to latex.
Once defined, team members can attach these labels to cases quickly and easily. The association is presented on the board elegantly using the initial icon and color. In practice we have seen team members get used to these icons very quickly and leverage them effectively as high throughput non-intrusive mediums of communication.
Detailed information around when and who added the label is documented under the history of the case as well. So if necessary, anybody can find out who they need to reach out to for more information.
The customer response to this addition has been overwhelmingly positive. We are excited to continue and work with them to further improve this feature and others in order to help them with access to the right information in a timely manner.