Development of an Electronic Dashboard to Monitor Intra-operative Patient Core Temperatures

Background Maintaining normothermia is a complex process which requires collaboration from perioperative personnel throughout all phases of perioperative care. It's essential that a patient's core temperature remain within normothermic range (36°C-38°C) to mitigate risk for surgical site infections (SSI) as well as other complications. Our surgical site infection performance improvement team (SSI-PI) implemented several interventions to maintain normothermia for our surgical patients but lacked an efficient process to obtain intra-operative core temperatures from the medical record to measure the efficacy of these interventions. This need led to development of an electronic dashboard to streamline review of intra-operative core temperatures. Methods At a 1,541 bed academic medical center, an Infection Preventionist along with SSI-PI team members collaborated with our Joint Data Analytics Team to create an electronic dashboard which communicates with our electronic medical record system to collate intra-operative core temperatures that are recorded every minute. Colorectal, abdominal hysterectomy and total joint arthroplasty procedures were chosen as the primary focus to develop this interactive dashboard. The dashboards contents and format were selected based on feedback provided by SSI-PI team members. Data within the dashboard was validated for accuracy by an Infection Preventionist. Results The dashboard shows starting, final, mean, and median core temperature measurements and calculates the percentage of core temperatures below 36.0°C for each patient. All temperature metrics can be displayed as an aggregate as well. Data can be analyzed by date range and filtered by hospital within our healthcare system, procedure type, surgeon, anesthesiologist, warming method, and by infection status. Conclusions Overall, this electronic dashboard has helped our SSI-PI team better understand the core temperature distribution among patients during their surgical procedures. More importantly, it has allowed the SSI-PI team to measure the effectiveness of warming practices in order to better maintain patient normothermia throughout the perioperative period.