When attempting to address safety and efficiency challenges on the front lines of healthcare, consultants and others often invoke analogies of pit crews and airline cockpit activities to help the general, non-medically trained population understand the breakdown of tasks and communications in fast paced, high stress environments. But the clinicians aren’t buying it anymore, if ever they did.

The next healthcare consultant to pull out slides with graphs and data points supported by an FMEA, Six Sigma or Lean methodology--expecting clinicians to nod along with enthusiasm--might as well be speaking Greek to chickens. Clinicians want to hear that you understand their story: that you are defining how to build in protection from error when they are on their fifth surgery of the day, waiting on missing forms and films, watching team members swap in and out, being informed that the arterial line is still not properly in the patient pushing surgery back 30 minutes, dealing with one cancelled procedure and two more added (including one emergent patient case which will divert two team members to the ED in three minutes), and the white noise of personal cell phones, beepers and audio from the equipment.

At a recent presentation on how to reduce error during surgery, I listened to a veteran consultant in Quality & Safety for the airline industry state that “if you speak up and talk to each other, you can reduce your error.” Such simplistic, shallow proclamations undermine credibility and only add to the white noise overshadowing the real issues and opportunities for innovative improvements.

It’s not sufficient to identify fourteen potential sources of error, and then not define concrete, practical solutions for the clinicians who will be responsible for the outcomes. Those who have never put on scrubs and stepped into an operating room to observe numerous procedures will continue to come up with detached and limited solutions to the clinicians who live the day-to-day reality of the operating room’s long hours, constant information transfers and updates, layers of policies, and variation from hospital to hospital.

As innovative healthcare consultants, it is our responsibility and obligation to provide tangible, human centered solutions to hospitals to support the valuable insights we uncover. Let’s replace some of those abstract data points on a graph with true insight and empathy to the needs not so easily quantified with metrics. Time spent experiencing and addressing those conditions specific to the OR will directly influence the ability to deliver effective solutions.