The fix was a moment.
A name.
And permission for anyone
to stop everything.
Every operation starts
with everyone standing still.
The surgeon. Anesthesia.
The scrub tech. The circulator.
Someone says the patient's name out loud.
The procedure.
The side.
Nobody moves until one person confirms it.
Sixty seconds.
The timeout.
Stood in that circle
more times than I can count.
It was not always there.
It exists because operations happened
on the wrong knee,
the wrong kidney,
the wrong patient.
Everyone in those rooms assumed
somebody else had checked.
AI now enters the same room.
The recommendation appears.
The workflow moves.
Nobody says the name out loud.
Nobody confirms before anyone acts.
We removed the pause
and forgot it was the thing
that kept people alive.
Which of your AI deployments
has a timeout?
Mo Johnson, MD MBA is a cardiothoracic surgeon and the founder of GPe Research. Field Notes are short dispatches from the clinical AI accountability frontier, published alongside the MedicoVigilance™ newsletter at medicovigilance.org.
Follow the work on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mo-johnson