Nudging Doctors in Intensive Care Unit Reduces Deaths, Study Finds

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110622115324.htm

ScienceDaily (June 22, 2011) — Caring for patients in a medical intensive care unit in a hospital and flying a 747 are complicated tasks that require tracking thousands of important details, some of which could get overlooked. That's why the pilot has a checklist and a copilot to make sure nothing slips by.

A new Northwestern Medicine study shows the attending physician in the intensive care unit could use a copilot, too. The mortality rate plummeted 50 percent when the attending physician in the intensive care unit had a checklist -- a fairly new concept in medicine -- and a trusted person prompting him to address issues on the checklist if they were being overlooked. Simply using a checklist alone did not produce an improvement in mortality.

"Attending physicians are good at thinking about big picture issues like respiratory failure or whatever diagnosis brought a patient to the intensive care unit, but some important details are overlooked because it's impossible for one person to remember and deal with all those details," said Curtis Weiss, M.D., the lead investigator and a fellow in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

[.....]

..