ABSTRACT
The quality of physician–nurse communication is believed to contribute to variation in risk-adjusted outcomes in intensive care units (ICU). This chapter explores how coordination benefits of "overhearing" that are realized on a daily basis in space shuttle mission control through the use of voice loop technology might theoretically be achieved in several healthcare settings, including the ICU, operating room, outpatient clinic, acute care, pharmacy, Emergency Department, and electronic ICU. A mediator facilitates conversations between the operational and engineering communities in mission control. A visual display based upon automatically processed voicemail serves a similar function in telecommunications network monitoring. The use of voice loops has been explored for primarily social communication in an office setting with few surprising events and relatively low consequences for failure. A similar approach would be for operating room schedulers to monitor in parallel communications in multiple operating rooms in order to predict when rooms will become available.
