It would be a nightmare for anyone to go into surgery for an organ transplant, and after, realize they’ve been given the wrong one.
Though events like this are very rare—making up only .03 percent of all operations every year in the U.S.—Richard Vazquez, who practiced general surgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital for 38 years, said they should never happen.
That’s why in 2015 he founded Chicago-based software startup SafeStart Medical, which uses smart mobile devices and a cloud-based patient and clinician portal to manage surgical safety processes.
The software, which is compliant with HIPAA, starts the surgical safety process on the administrative side and involves the patient every step of the way.
Here's how it works: The software basically creates an enhanced patient safety record that includes surgeon annotated photos, important clinical documents, allergies and consent forms. It then requires both physicians and patients to review and approve of records and scheduled surgeries.
“What we wanted to do was break the siloed thought processes apart, and we also wanted to do something nobody else had done,” said Vazquez, SafeStart's CEO and chief marketing officer. “We wanted to involve the patient in the safety process.”
Vazquez said SafeStart is designed to cut down on the rate of what he calls “never events,” surgical mistakes which range from accidentally performing a procedure on the wrong body part of a patient, to giving a patient the wrong organ during a transplant. Only about 8,000 to 10,000 patients are affected by these kinds of mistakes every year, Vazquez said, but SafeStart's mission is to eradicate them completely.
“Those are things that should have a zero incidence in this world and anything above zero is unacceptable,” he said, explaining that for the most part, communication and hand-off errors are responsible for at least 50 percent of never events.
Vazquez said he got the idea for SafeStart five years ago when chatting with a patient he had just performed surgery on. The patient worked in tech, developing mobile applications, which sparked Vazquez’s interest in how to digitize more of the protocols that take place when prepping for a surgery.
SafeStart, which now operates out of Chicago health-tech incubator MATTER and employs five people, doesn’t have any paying customers yet as it is still doing field research to see how its software affects healthcare systems and outcomes. But the startup is currently running three studies, one at a children’s hospital in Peoria, one in Northwestern’s orthopedics department and another at the VA hospital in Chicago.
Once SafeStart commercializes its software, though, Vazquez said it will be available on a subscription basis and that rates will vary depending on the size of a healthcare system.
