This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Merrell, R. C. Articles by McCullough, K. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by Merrell, R. C. Articles by McCullough, K. Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Telemedicine for the Operating Room of the Future

Dept of Surgery, Virginia Commonwealth University Health System, 1101 E. Marshall Street, Sanger 8-013, Box 980480, Richmond, VA 23298; ronald.merrell{at}vcu,edu

Bruce E. Jarrell, MD

Department of Surgery, University of Maryland, School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland

Noah S. Schenkman, MD

Department of Urology, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, DC

Bradley Schoener, PhD

Kathy McCullough

University of Maryland Medical System, Baltimore, Maryland

Telemedicine is becoming a subset of information science and should benefit tremendously from the geometric growth of information architecture in hospitals. The use of telemedicine to break the isolation of the operating room is a highly achievable goal. An open operating room has information on demand for the personnel, fluid communication among operating room personnel, and broad interaction with the learner community and consultants. In an operating room with significant data capture, the patient is brought into the process not only as a real person, but also as a huge data set that acquires all the events of the surgery. The data include the visual, electrical, and mechanical events that define the surgical procedure. As part of a dynamic electronic medical record, they are available to those who are present and those who are asked to help from even a great distance away with real-time advice. The data are also available to those who seek to understand what happened to the patient afterwards for the purpose of root cause analysis, near miss analysis, instruction, or more accurate medical records.

Surgical Innovation, Vol. 10, No. 2, 91-94 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/107155170301000206


CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?