Pittsburgh Surgical Outcomes Research Center
Transforming the conduct of clinical research

Behavioral and Decision Sciences

Transactive memory in trauma resuscitation teams Phase 1 & 2

Improving the effectiveness of trauma resuscitation in the emergency department is a major priority for the United Sates health care system. The underlying hypothesis of this research is that a major determinant of resuscitation effectiveness is the presence of a well-developed transactive memory system (TMS), a collective systems for encoding, storing and retrieving information. The overall goal of this study is to determine the link between TMS and trauma team performance.

Testing the efficacy of two video game interventions on physician performance in trauma triage.

In prior work we developed two video game interventions to recalibrate physician heuristics in trauma triage. We tested the ability of the games to modify physician decision making on a virtual simulation, and found that physicians exposed to the games made fewer diagnostic errors than physicians who either used the active control (a text-based educational program) or the passive control (no intervention). We now want to link these results to claims data to determine whether exposure to the different interventions had an effect on physician performance in real-life.

Clinical Cues And Trauma Triage

We are doing a retrospective chart review to identify the clinical cues that trigger a physician's categorization of a patient as having a 'severe injury.'