Effective teamwork is critical to ensuring patient safety, particularly in intensive settings such as critical care. This paper describes a “hackathon” – an intensive problem-solving event commonly used in computer science designed to stimulate creative solutions – focused on the challenges encountered by rapid team formation in critical care settings (such as for cardiac resuscitation). Hackathon teams were multidisciplinary, comprised of healthcare professionals and academics with expertise in communications, psychology and organizational sciences. The paper briefly discusses the three solutions proposed, and the impacts of leveraging this approach for solving other problems specific to health care management.

Efforts to understand the nature of human error can enhance care safety. Discussing the potential for unexpected human behaviors during crises to result in failure, this commentary reveals how insights drawn from video analysis of teams in critical situations informed adjustments to training to reduce risks in cardiac care.