Potential uses of AI for perioperative nursing handoffs: a qualitative study.

Objective: Situational awareness and anticipatory guidance for nurses receiving a patient after surgery are key to patient safety. Little work has defined the role of artificial intelligence (AI) to support these functions during nursing handoff communication or patient assessment. We used interviews and direct observations to better understand how AI could work in this context. Materials and Methods: 58 handoffs were observed of patients entering and leaving the post-anesthesia care unit at a single center. 11 nurses participated in semi-structured interviews. Mixed inductive-deductive thematic analysis extracted major themes and subthemes around roles for AI supporting postoperative nursing. Results: Four themes emerged from the interviews: (1) Nurse understanding of patient condition guides care decisions, (2) Handoffs are important to nurse situational awareness; problem focus and information transfer may be improved by AI, (3) AI may augment nurse care decision making and team communication, (4) User experience and information overload are likely barriers to using AI. Key subthemes included that AI-identified problems would be discussed at handoff and team communications, that AI-estimated elevated risks would trigger patient re-evaluation, and that AI-identified important data may be a valuable addition to nursing assessment. Discussion and Conclusion: Most research on postoperative handoff communication relies on structured checklists. Our results suggest that properly designed AI tools might facilitate postoperative handoff communication for nurses by identifying elevated risks faced by a specific patient, triggering discussion on those topics.

Zpráva o projektu mySupport Study

The aim of the mySupport Study, which runs from 2019 to 2022, is to implement the psychosocial education intervention Family Care Decision Support (FCDS) in 6 countries in Europe and North America and to develop guidelines for its implementation, as well as to evaluate its benefits for caregivers of people with dementia. Website: https://mysupportstudy.eu/

Perceived Social Norms Guide Health Care Decisions for Oneself and Others: A Cross-Sectional Experiment in a US Online Panel

Background: Global aging has increased the reliance on surrogates to make health care decisions for others. We investigated the differences between making health care decisions and predicting health care decisions, self-other differences for made and predicted health care decisions, and the roles of perceived social norms, emotional closeness, empathy, age, and gender. Methods: Participants ( N = 2037) from a nationally representative US panel were randomly assigned to make or to predict a health care decision. They were also randomly assigned to 1 of 5 recipients: themselves, a loved one 60 y or older, a loved one younger than 60 y, a distant acquaintance 60 y or older, or a distant acquaintance younger than 60 y. Hypothetical health care scenarios depicted choices between relatively safe lower-risk treatments with a good chance of yielding mild health improvements versus higher-risk treatments that offered a moderate chance of substantial health improvements. Participants reported their likelihood of choosing lower- versus higher-risk treatments, their perceptions of family and friends’ approval of risky health care decisions, and their empathy. Results: We present 3 key findings. First, made decisions involved less risk taking than predicted decisions, especially for distant others. Second, predicted decisions were similar for others and oneself, but made decisions were less risk taking for others than oneself. People predicted that loved ones would be less risk taking than distant others would be. Third, perceived social norms were more strongly associated than empathy with made and predicted decisions. Limitations: Hypothetical scenarios may not adequately represent emotional processes in health care decision making. Conclusions: Perceived social norms may sway people to take less risk in health care decisions, especially when making decisions for others. These findings have implications for improving surrogate decision making. Highlights People made less risky health care decisions for others than for themselves, even though they predicted others would make decisions similar to their own. This has implications for understanding how surrogates apply the substituted judgment standard when making decisions for patients. Perceived social norms were more strongly related to decisions than treatment-recipient (relationship closeness, age) and decision-maker (age, gender, empathy) characteristics. Those who perceived that avoiding health care risks was valued by their social group were less likely to choose risky medical treatments. Understanding the power of perceived social norms in shaping surrogates’ decisions may help physicians to engage surrogates in shared decision making. Knowledge of perceived social norms may facilitate the design of decision aids for surrogates.

Adaptive Deep Brain Stimulation for the Treatment of Parkinson Disease and Essential Tremor

Horizon Scan reports provide brief summaries of information regarding new and emerging health technologies; Heath Technology Update articles typically focus on a single device or intervention. These technologies are identified through the CADTH Horizon Scanning Service as topics of potential interest to health care decision-makers in Canada. This Horizon Scan summarizes the available information regarding an emerging technology, Percept PC Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) system with BrainSense technology, for the treatment of Parkinson disease and essential tremors.