JMIR Perioperative Medicine
Technologies for pre- and post-operative education, preventative interventions, and clinical care for surgery and anaesthesiology patients, as well as informatics applications in anesthesia, surgery, critical care, and pain medicine
Editor-in-Chief:
Nidhi Rohatgi, MD, MS, SFHM, Stanford University, USA
Recent Articles

Anesthesiologists require an understanding of their patients’ outcomes to evaluate their performance and improve their practice. Traditionally, anesthesiologists had limited information about their surgical outpatients’ outcomes due to minimal contact post discharge. Leveraging digital health innovations for analyzing personal and population outcomes may improve perioperative care. BC Children’s Hospital’s postoperative follow-up registry for outpatient surgeries collects short-term outcomes such as pain, nausea, and vomiting. Yet, these data were previously not available to anesthesiologists.



Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) refers to symptomatic descent of the vaginal wall. To reduce surgical failure rates, surgical correction can be augmented with the insertion of polypropylene mesh. This benefit is offset by the risk of mesh complication, predominantly mesh exposure through the vaginal wall. If mesh placement is under consideration as part of prolapse repair, patient selection and counseling would benefit from the prediction of mesh exposure; yet, no such reliable preoperative method currently exists. Past studies indicate that inflammation and associated cytokine release is correlated with mesh complication. While some degree of mesh-induced cytokine response accompanies implantation, excessive or persistent cytokine responses may elicit inflammation and implant rejection.

Perioperative medication has made significant contributions to enhancing patient safety. Nevertheless, administering medication during this period still poses considerable safety concerns, with many errors being detected only after causing significant physiological disturbances. The intricacy of medication administration in the perioperative setting poses specific challenges to patient safety. To address these challenges, implementing potential strategies and interventions is critical. One such strategy is raising awareness and revising educational curricula regarding drug safety in the operating room. Another crucial strategy is recognizing the importance of redundancy and multiple checks in the operating room as a hallmark of medication safety, which is not a common practice. Digital health technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) also offer the potential to improve perioperative medication safety. Computerized physician order entry systems, electronic medication administration records, and barcode medication administration systems have been proven to reduce medication errors and improve patient safety. By implementing these strategies and interventions, health care professionals can enhance the safety of perioperative medication administration and improve patient outcomes.

Hospital stays after colorectal surgery are increasingly being reduced by enhanced recovery and early discharge protocols. As a result, postoperative complications may frequently manifest after discharge in the home setting, potentially leading to emergency room presentations and readmissions. Virtual care interventions after hospital discharge may capture clinical deterioration at an early stage and hold promise for the prevention of readmissions and overall better outcomes. Recent technological advances have enabled continuous vital sign monitoring by wearable wireless sensor devices. However, the potential of these devices for virtual care interventions for patients discharged after colorectal surgery is currently unknown.

The current assessment of recovery after total hip or knee replacement is largely based on the measurement of health outcomes through self-report and clinical observations at follow-up appointments in clinical settings. Home activity-based monitoring may improve assessment of recovery by enabling the collection of more holistic information on a continuous basis.

Postoperative deterioration is often preceded by abnormal vital parameters. Therefore, vital parameters of postoperative patients are routinely measured by nursing staff. Wrist-worn sensors could potentially provide an alternative tool for the measurement of vital parameters in low-acuity settings. These devices would allow more frequent or even continuous measurements of vital parameters without relying on time-consuming manual measurements, provided their accuracy in this clinical population is established.


Estimating surgical case duration accurately is an important operating room efficiency metric. Current predictive techniques in spine surgery include less sophisticated approaches such as classical multivariable statistical models. Machine learning approaches have been used to predict outcomes such as length of stay and time returning to normal work, but have not been focused on case duration.
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