In the near future, an alarm sounding outside the operating room door may have surgeons reaching for their pens. That’s because a new device has been designed to alert the surgical team if a patient’s incision site hasn’t been marked. Invented by a physician at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the device--a wristband that enforces surgical-site marking--should help eliminate wrong-site surgeries. About 4,000 wrong-site surgeries take place in the United States each year--that’s about one in 17,000 surgeries--and are the fifth most frequent life-threatening medical error. Using a marker pen on the patient’s skin to indicate the surgical site has become common practice in hospitals across the country. Barnes-Jewish Hospital, the primary adult teaching hospital for the School of Medicine, began requiring the practice three years ago. On July 1, 2004, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations adopted a set of formal guidelines that establish marking surgical sites as a nationwide policy.
