O.R. PEER® History
O.R. PEER® was born out of necessity at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Billings, Montana, in the summer of 2005. That year St. Vincent’s OR was understaffed, requiring nearly 50% travelers. The traveling staff was skilled, but unfamiliar with the physicians, procedures, processes, and workflows at St. Vincent’s. OR turnover slowed to a crawl while travelers searched for instruments or equipment they didn’t know was needed for the procedure.
With an already overworked staff, no solution was readily available. A project was coordinated to solve the problem. Friedrick Schweitzer was hired for the summer to photograph surgeries, interview staff and create PowerPoints detailing specific setup information for twelve surgical procedures. The project was dubbed “PEER” (PowerPoint-Based Electronic Educational Resource).
At the end of the summer a survey was administered to 35 staff members asking them what they thought about the PEER project. The results were more than encouraging:
- 91% had used PEER
- 91% wanted more PEERs created
- 97% reported it was easy to use
- 96% were satisfied with the system
Throughout the fall, Cardiac Charge Nurse Sally Hageman, Nurse Joan Brewer, Nurse Educator Mariah Holdbrook, Lead Surgical Tech Ed McCaffree, Anesthesiologist Mike Schweitzer and technical consultant Friedrick Schweitzer worked together to co-author a case study about the PEER project. In November, 2005, a poster presentation was submitted and accepted for the 2006 AORN congress in Washington, D.C. The poster was awarded the “Blue Ribbon Poster of Excellence” and generated a lot of buzz at Congress. The case study was submitted to the AORN journal in December of 2005 and accepted for publication in early January, 2006.
After Congress, a local paper, The Billings Gazette, featured a front-page article about PEER project. In May, 2006, Healthcare Traveler magazine featured a brief blurb about the PEER project as well. In June, 2006, the AORN Journal featured an article titled “An Electronic Educational Resource for Ready Reference in the OR”. The article won the AORN Journal’s “Outstanding Educational Article of the Year” for 2006 at the 2007 AORN Congress in Orlando.
Encouraged by a year of positive experiences and the national recognition, the St. Vincent team was ready to take the project to the next level. Over the next two years, large investments were made in developing a standalone application that could be deployed in a Citrix Server environment or on a hospital’s existing computer network. During the same time period, numerous new features were designed into the product, including an innovative, touch-screen enabled graphical user interface that was extremely intuitive for the end user, survey tools, quizzes, a usage tracking database and report tools, and O.R. PEER’s easy-to-use, proprietary content development system, the PEER Page Builder™ and PEER Library Manager™.
O.R. PEER 2.0 was released in 2006, and O.R. PEER 3.0 debuted in February, 2007. Over the next 18 months of beta testing at multiple facilities, the application was optimized to speed up load times, and with the input from nursing professionals around the country, PEER went through several more revisions to become even easier to use and more functional. Meanwhile at St. Vincent’s more than 2,000 satisfaction surveys were filled out via O.R. PEER and were used to improve efficiency, equipment problems and workflows.
Now with a standardized process of installation and implementation, O.R. PEER is being offered to hospitals around the planet. With interest in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Vietnam, O.R. PEER® is quickly becoming an educational solution of choice for healthcare in the 21st Century.
