The Center for Perioperative Research in Quality (CPRQ), in collaboration with the Vanderbilt Center for Experiential Learning and Assessment (CELA) and the Middle Tennessee Center for Improving Patient Safety (CIPS) conducts basic and applied research toward improving patient safety and clinical quality. Using a range of human factors engineering, cognitive psychology, and biomedical informatics techniques, CPRQ studies clinical performance during patient care and in realistic simulations, to better understand how and why care deviates from optimal. Interventions are then designed and evaluated to improve safety and quality. Because many of our methods are applicable across healthcare, CPRQ supports other investigators performing similar work for example in emergency medicine, critical care, ambulatory medicine, and out-of-hospital resuscitation. CPRQ conducts studies on understanding the cause of unexpected clinical events and how such events are prevented. In particular, CPRQ is interested in the nature of expertise, clinician-clinician communication, the workload of individual clinicians and of teams, situational awareness, and various other intrinsic and extrinsic variables that affect performance during routine and non-routine situations in the OR as well as in simulated environments. CPRQ investigators are also interested in team coordination and effectiveness (especially the performance of clinical teams during crises), the design and evaluation of new and currently used medical technologies with emphasis on the effects of the introduction of new medical technology on clinical care and the use of electronically generated clinical data to identify evolving events and support decision-making. On-going research evaluates human-technology interactions as well as individual and group performance- shaping factors such as novel methods of information presentation to generate practical benefits in terms of improved clinical care processes. |
