Implementing A Surgical Pre-Operative Checklist: Improving Transparency & Communication

Our goal was to first analyze what the current practice was and if there was a need for improvement. To our knowledge, each surgical service has its own preop protocol and this is not standardized across the hospital. Furthermore, very few services have EPIC based protocols that allow for documentation and information sharing. For example, the neurosurgery service uses paper checklists, a style that is effective yet outdated. A survey was sent out to multiple departments in order to gauge the current landscape of pre-operative care. Questions were posed to analyze if there was a need for improved documentation by surgical services, whether or not nonsurgical personnel had clear operative plans for combined patients, and whether or not there was a role for a pre-operative checklist in EPIC to bring all the healthcare providers onto the same page