Fifty years ago doctors at Mayo Clinic opened the doors to modern open heart surgery, using the heart lung machine. Back then you had about a 50-50 chance of making it off the table.

Now you can be 98-percent certain you'll survive. But Mayo Clinic doctors say that's not good enough. They’re using methods developed by the aeronautics industry to make surgery even safer.

Air travel is very complex, but very safe. A main reason for this high level of safety is the time and research the industry put into designing technology that's user friendly. For example, everything the pilot needs is at his or her fingertips. And he or she can communicate with the crew at anytime. This design makes it less likely for the pilot to make errors. Such finely tuned orchestration grew out of an aeronautics discipline called human factors.

"They developed approaches for dealing with the complexities of the aircraft, such as check lists, to help the human cope with very complex machinery."

And that's what Surgeon Thoralf Sundt hopes to do in the operating room.

"What human factors means to us in the operating room is trying to understand how to prevent errors in medicine. And if an error occurs how to capture it quickly before any harm is done."

Dr. Sundt is teaming up with quality care expert Sarah Henrickson on a study to see if observing what happens in the O.R. can help them understand how to make the process better and safer.

You can see how the camera used in the study may have caught an area where communication could be improved — between the surgeon and the perfusionist. He or she is the person who runs the heart-lung machine, which is a very complex piece of equipment.

"I may give a command here. But I’m actually faced away from the perfusionist. They can't see my mouth, they can't read my lips and I’m talking down into the wound."

So perhaps rearranging where people stand could improve communication.

"We think that there's a lot we can learn by watching how the team functions."

Making surgery safer for those who put their lives in their medical team's hands

Doctor Sundt says some other issues he noticed from observing how his operating room functions include distractions caused by beepers going off and people walking into the room. He hopes to use information from the study to make operating rooms safer and more efficient.
He also says encouraging nurses and technicians on the surgical team to speak up if issues arise will add to safety in the O.R..