A Patient-oriented Risk Communication Tool to Improve Patient Experience, Knowledge and Outcomes After Elective Surgery

The application features simple and consistent design, large well-lit buttons that tolerate tremor, and simple language. The process will be applied in preoperative clinics at The Ottawa Hospital (TOH), where patients will be asked to provide their personal health history through a series of questions already used on our TOH preoperative health screener. These values will then populate the NSQIP Universal Risk Calculator, which we have calibrated to TOH data, to generate personalized risks of mortality, serious complications, and hospital length of stay. These risk estimates will be communicated directly to the patient using absolute risk estimates represented pictorially (best practice for risk communication to patients). Risk estimates will also be provided to the patient's clinician.