Intraoperative Anesthesia Care Transition Checklist

Perioperative management decisions must often be made quickly and rely on practitioners having relevant facts at hand. During transitions of patient care between anesthesia providers, known as "handovers," information may not be completely or faithfully communicated, consequently impairing the provider's ability to intervene correctly in response to subsequent events. Checklists have consistently proven to be effective at enhancing communications during handovers, but whether anesthesia checklists improve patient outcomes has yet to be proven. The investigators propose to randomize intraoperative anesthesia provider handovers to standard practice (no specific format) or to a handover checklist presented by a decision-support system in conjunction with the investigators electronic record. Specifically, the investigators will test the hypothesis that incorporating a largely pre-populated handover checklist into transitions of intraoperative anesthesia care decreases a composite of mortality and serious cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, urinary, and infectious complications.