Poster Abstract: A New Metaphor to Display Critical Pulmonary Events during Anesthesia

The anesthesiologist is faced with a fire-hose of information in the operating room. Data from the patient monitors include numerical data, waveforms, control settings, and alarm conditions. During an unexpected event, the anesthesiologist must quickly assess available information in order to diagnose and treat the patient before the patient is injured. However, human error is associated with more than 80% of critical anesthesia incidents and more than 50% of anesthetic deaths.1 In a recent study at the University of Washington, Department of Anesthesiology, 32% of the reported human error incidents were related …