TURN RECORD BUTTON ON Patients appreciate leaving surgery with video recordings of their surgeries, says surgeon and best-selling author Martin A. Makary, MD, MPH.

VIDEO RECORDING
Give Patients Video of Their Surgeries

When I perform a laparoscopic operation, I download the video that's displayed on the operating-room monitor from the camera at the tip of the laparoscope and give it to patients afterward on a thumbdrive. Some like to watch it. Some show it to their referring doctor. And some smartly upload it to their private electronic health records in the cloud like healthvault.com or dossia.org.

Sharing videos with patients may be associated with improved patient satisfaction because doing so embodies a broader spirit of medical transparency. A couple of notes of caution: First, inform patients that their medical procedure will be recorded and give them the option to decline. If they opt to receive a copy of their procedure video, tell them what to expect so that the known imprecisions intrinsic to medical procedures that are within the standard of care do not cause false alarm. If you're concerned about the medical-legal risk exposure of recorded videos being discoverable in a potential malpractice claim, you can declare a priori that videos are recorded solely for quality improvement purposes, and thus they are likely not discoverable by plaintiff's attorneys in the same way that morbidity and mortality conference proceedings aren't discoverable.

So much of surgery today is performed using sophisticated video equipment, but the record button is often turned off. The potential to harness the data in these videos and drive quality improvement may be substantial. Given the modern capacity for data storage, incorporating procedure videos into a patient's electronic health record could be considered as routine as keeping computed tomography scan images.

Martin Makary, MD, MPH
Johns Hopkins Hospital
Baltimore, Md.
[email protected]