IE's Yu receives $1.6M grant to research wearable sensors for assessing teamwork in surgery
Investigators from Purdue’s School of Industrial Engineering and Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis are researching how wearable sensors can facilitate modeling and assessment of surgery teamwork.
Denny Yu, assistant professor of industrial engineering and an adjunct assistant professor of surgery at IU School of Medicine, was recently awarded a four-year, $1.6-million grant as principal investigator from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (Grant #1R01HS028026) to further the research. His multi-principal investigator on the project is Dimitrios Stefanidis, MD, PhD, vice chair of surgical education and professor of surgery at IU School of Medicine. Co-investigators at Purdue include Felicia Roberts, professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communications, and Arman Sabbaghi, associate professor in the Department of Statistics.
Non-technical skills encompass teamwork, communication, decision-making, situational awareness and leadership that impact patient safety in surgery. Lack of these skills is the most frequent cause for patient safety events that affect patient mortality, post-operative pain and quality of life. Lapses in communication, teamwork and leadership have been shown to account for 60% of major perioperative complications, most of which are related to communication failures.
“We know team skills are of key importance to patient safety,” Yu said. “However, team skills are either not measured at all or measured by expert observers which is extremely time consuming and costly. Our engineering and medicine team hope to find practical solutions using sensors and artificial intelligence algorithms. This platform could automate the teaming assessment, an important and commonly overlooked skill in surgical teams.”
Stefanidis said surgery is a “team sport” and that patient safety and favorable outcomes are dependent on several factors, including technical skill, clinical decision-making of the surgeon and the performance of the surgical team.
“How the team works together, how well the team members communicate with each other, how aware everyone is of their surroundings, and how strong the leadership of the surgeon is all play a role in the success of a surgery,” he said.
While Stefanidis said that surgery is very safe today, there is still room for improvement of processes and outcomes.
“The approach we are taking in this study of developing objective and reliable, nontechnical skill measures promises to provide the means that will allow OR teams to improve their collaborative work and ultimately benefit our patients," he said.
The grant will aid ongoing educational and research partnerships to develop novel technological solutions for pressing health-care problems.
Mung Chiang, executive vice president for strategic initiatives at Purdue University, said of the partnership that the enhanced collaboration with IU School of Medicine represents “yet another Purdue ‘Giant Leap’ forward.”
Current approaches to improving teamwork skills have relied on observation-based assessment tools by expert coaches. Despite proven benefits on patient outcomes, implementation of training in surgery is limited, especially for health institutions with limited resources and non-technical skill expertise. At present, non-technical skills assessments require trained observers and are time-consuming and resource-intensive to obtain. Importantly, these assessments are subject to observer bias which threatens their objectivity and value. These limitations are a key barrier to wide implementation.
Automated sensing-based approaches do not require an expert observers and can conduct real-time observations. In turn, these methods could provide objective measurements of teaming skills allowing for more widespread implementation, partial automation, and improve team skills over time. Based on the complex nature of teamwork and the high-stakes scenarios in surgery, a multi-dimensional approach for skills evaluation is necessary.