Metadata: how data about data affects patient safety in anesthesia.

Purpose of review: Metadata - data about data - offers powerful opportunities to enhance patient safety in anesthesiology. By analyzing patterns, behaviors, and processes from electronic health records (EHRs), physiologic monitors, and other digital systems, metadata helps clinicians and administrators assess trends, optimize workflows, and identify safety risks. This review explores perioperative metadata sources and highlights real-world applications, including clinical decision support tools, operational dashboards, and EHR analytics. Challenges such as poor data quality, lack of standardization, and risks of misuse for surveillance or punitive purposes are also examined. We discuss how anesthesiologists can use metadata to improve documentation, monitor quality metrics, and detect early signs of deterioration.

Recent findings: Metadata from EHRs and monitors is being used to identify practice patterns, enhance documentation, and detect early patient deterioration. Operational dashboards and decision support tools relying on metadata have shown promise for improving safety. Challenges include data overload, documentation variability, and ethical concerns about privacy, surveillance, and clinician accountability.

Summary: Metadata provides a framework to classify, interpret, and act on data from countless medical sources. In anesthesiology, it holds significant potential for improving patient safety, though clinicians must understand both its promise and limitations.