Clinical ScienceAcceptability of the decision support for safer surgery tool

•We assess surgical providers' perceptions of a clinical decision support tool.•The tool provides preoperative patient-level risk estimates of postoperative adverse events.•Surgeons rated the tool as “very” or “moderately useful” in 25% of the 1,006 patient cases.•Certain aspects of the tool (eg, improve quality of care; enhance informed consent) were rated favorably.•The tool may help train novice surgeons and promote more team-based care.

BackgroundWe examined providers' perceptions of the Decision Support for Safer Surgery (DS3) tool, which provided preoperative patient-level risk estimates of postoperative adverse events.MethodsThe DS3 tool was evaluated at 2 academic medical centers. During the validation study, surgeons provided usefulness ratings of the DS3 tool for each patient before surgery. At the end of the study, providers' perceptions of the DS3 tool were assessed via questionnaire. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and independent samples t tests.ResultsDuring the trial, 23 surgeons completed usefulness ratings of the DS3 tool for 1,006 patients. Surgeons rated the tool as “very useful” or “moderately useful” in 251 (25%) of the cases, “neutral” in 469 (46.6%) of the cases, and “moderately unuseful” or “not useful” in 286 (28.4%) cases. At the end of the trial, 32 providers completed the questionnaire; perceptions were relatively neutral, although several aspects were rated quite favorably.ConclusionThe DS3 tool may be most useful for achieving particular tasks (eg, training novice surgeons, increasing patient engagement) or encouraging specific processes (eg, team-based care) in surgical care settings.