Why CheckSite?
Product Background
In January 2004, the CheckSite System for Surgical Patient Safety was conceptualized. The inventor, a surgeon and medical school professor with over thirty years of surgical experience in teaching hospitals, was concerned about the incidence of wrong-site surgical errors at his institution. His hospital had adopted policies in 2002 that were intended to prevent such events; each surgeon, with input from the patient, was required to mark the site pre-operatively and it was mandated that the staff have a “time out” in the operating room to ensure procedural accuracy. In fact, in July of 2004, the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Hospital Organizations (JCAHO) instituted a “Universal Protocol” requiring that hospitals nationwide adopt similar processes.
Still, despite the new policies, the surgeon's hospital was not free from wrong-site surgical error events. After some investigation, he discovered that each of the recent surgical errors at the hospital were associated with a failure to mark properly the surgical site.
The surgeon himself firmly held a belief that the majority of the medical community shares – that the error rate in surgical site marking should be zero, and that any wrong site procedure is unacceptable. It was from this belief, and from an understanding of the root causes of surgical errors, that the surgeon developed the concept of the CheckSite System.
The CheckSite System was designed to be a reminder mechanism to help surgeons avoid these rare but devastating errors. When developed for the marketplace, features were added to CheckSite that allow hospitals to enforce the pre-operative processes of their choosing. The system is simple and is not dependent on other information systems in the hospital. It is easy to use and is designed not to intrude into the normal workflow of the OR.
Similar reminder systems are utilized to remind different types of professionals to perform critical job functions. For example, an alarm sounds in the cockpit of a commercial airplane to remind the pilot to extend the landing gear when the pilot throttles back for a descent. A second alarm may be triggered when the flaps are lowered, and yet a third alarm might sound when the plane comes within 200 feet of the ground. These automated reminders do not assume that pilots are incompetent, merely that they are human. The 1999 publication of the Institute of Medicine , “To Err is Human,” reminded us that medical professionals are no different. Anyone can make mistakes.
The CheckSite System is designed to help hospitals and surgeons achieve 100% compliance with critical pre-operative processes such as site-marking, confirmation of the Informed Consent, verification of the History & Physical, and many others.. To view a detailed description of the CheckSite System, click here.
