As a clinical leader, you play a pivotal role in shaping your team's engagement with innovative tools and technologies. By leveraging the unique capabilities of Theator’s Surgical Intelligence platform, you can increase adoption, foster collaboration, and drive meaningful outcomes for your department. Based on the experiences of department heads at leading medical centers, here are five effective methods to help you maximize Theator’s impact:
1. Share Interesting Cases with Your Team
Theator is a goldmine of fascinating and educational cases. As a leader, you can take the initiative and identify noteworthy procedures to share with your department using the app. This sparks curiosity, discussions, and learning, while encouraging other team members to share cases they find interesting and valuable.
Encourage Transparency
If you haven’t done so already, consider giving open access to your surgeons so they can all view cases from across the department. This will give them the opportunity to quietly and independently learn from their peers. While surgeons often don’t see a reason to review their own cases unless something went wrong, access to department-wide cases can offer fresh perspectives and valuable learning moments.
Create and Share Collections to Build Organizational Memory
Use Theator’s Collections feature to organize and share cases based on specific themes, best practices, or learning objectives. Unlike M&M meetings, which tend to focus on retrospective analysis, collections can act as a living repository of insights tailored to departmental interests. Some ideas for collections include:
Moment of the Week – A standout case or technique worth highlighting.
BMI > 40 – A collection dedicated to complex cases in high-BMI patients.
Rare Complications – A repository of unexpected intraoperative challenges.
Encouraging surgeons to browse and contribute to these collections fosters a habit of continuous learning and increases engagement with Theator.
2. Provide Feedback on Specific Cases with Comments
Theator offers an easy way to provide constructive feedback to your surgeons. By using the commenting function within specific cases, you can highlight areas for improvement or commend excellent execution. When discussing cases with individual surgeons, pull up Theator and use the video playback as a visual aid to make your feedback more actionable and impactful.
3. Use Theator Videos in Morning and M&M Meetings
Routine morning meetings and Mortality & Morbidity (M&M) reviews are perfect opportunities to utilize Theator’s capabilities. You can elevate discussions by displaying relevant videos from the platform, with visual insights supporting more accurate case analyses. For broader context and seamless presentations, use Theator’s collections feature to organize relevant cases ahead of time.
4. Track Surgeon Usage and Recognize High Engagement
Theator provides detailed usage reports that show how actively surgeons are engaging with the platform. Celebrate high engagement and encourage others by giving top users shout outs in departmental emails or meetings. At the same time, reach out privately to team members who engage less, to understand their challenges and offer guidance on how they can benefit from the platform.
Motivate with Trophies and Plaques
Go beyond shoutouts by recognizing high engagement with tangible rewards. This will set a standard by showing the team that you consider accurate, efficient video review a top priority.
5. Host a "Movie Night" for Case Reviews
Turn case reviews into a fun and collaborative event by organizing a “Movie Night” for your team. Select a series of interesting, educational cases and gather your team to watch and discuss them together in a more informal setting that boosts camaraderie, engagement, and enthusiasm.
Idea: Food and drinks will make the event more enjoyable and encourage attendance.
Final Thoughts
Theator isn’t just a tool—it’s an enabler for better performance and clinical outcomes. Using these methods to boost engagement, department heads and clinical leaders can actively foster a culture of learning, collaboration, excellence, and innovation.