You shouldn’t text and drive. So why would physicians text and operate?

Technology, especially mobile technology, has done a lot of great things for the healthcare space. It’s made record keeping and patient tracking easier, and it’s helped providers make almost continual leaps and bounds in quality improvement, safety and value creation.
It can also be a dangerous temptation.
A few weeks ago, the particulars surrounding Joan Rivers’ death grew more unsettling. An anonymous staff member at Yorkville Endoscopy alleged that Ms. Rivers’ ENT physician snapped a selfie with the comedienne while she was anesthetized after an unauthorized biopsy. Ms. Rivers subsequently stopped breathing and was transferred to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, where she later died. The selfie incident is unconfirmed, though the allegations are enough to raise concern about where the physician’s attention was truly paid while Ms. Rivers was on the operating table.
Last year, at Torrance (Calif.) Memorial Hospital, an anesthesiologist and nurse’s aid covered an anesthetized patient in stickers and snapped her picture, thinking she’d be amused (she was a former hospital employee). Instead, she sued.
In a 2011 incident, an anesthesiologist at Medical City Dallas became distracted on a mobile device during a multi-hour surgery, according to the attending surgeon. He failed to notice the patient’s dangerously low oxygen levels until 10 or 15 minutes after she her skin began to turn blue. The woman was pronounced dead during the surgery, a routine heart procedure.
However, the surgeon testified he hadn’t thought much of the anesthesiologist’s actions at the time. “You know, we see this sort of thing with these procedures. I mean, they’re long procedures. We see this kind of thing, and usually…it doesn’t seem to be a problem with relatively short procedures. What can I say? I mean, it happens,” he said in his testimony taken for the subsequent lawsuit, filed by the patient’s family against the anesthesiologist, surgeon and hospital.
The anesthesiologist, in his deposition, later said that while he didn’t think surfing the Internet or social media during treatment was the best idea, it could be done. “I could do it safely,” he said, according to a report from the Dallas Observer. The lawsuit is still pending.