Calling all smartphone programmers: The Society for Technology in Anesthesia Engineering (STA) is offering cash prizes to the top three entrees into its smartphone contest. In an effort to bring the power of smart phones in health care, STA wants to develop more tools for health care professionals. The 2013 contest challenges participants to produce an app that guides users through preoperative timeouts and gives evidence of its completion. Members of a perioperative team go through a checklist to confirm that the correct procedure will be performed on the correct patient. Current electronic medical records permit clinicians to indicate that timeout has been completed, however they do not provide any documentation that demonstrates that anything was actually done. A template checklist can be found here. All entrants must register on the STA Web site by December 21, 2012. At that time, those who enter need to provide a description of the app’s feature set. Judges will evaluate entrants based on ease of use, reliability, and completeness. The top prize is $500.
