Department Explorer: Surgical Services
Department Explorer: Surgical Services
Department Explorer: Surgical Services is an analytics tool that provides managers multiple views of data regarding operational efficiency utilization, and case level details specific to the operating room. This information helps users to better analyze specific OR data such as patient prep, anesthesia prep, room turn-around, room and staff scheduling, and procedure data. Separating OR data from other hospital functions provides for specific complex processes to be analyzed along unique OR process paths. This leads to a better understanding, analysis, and improvement opportunities in the areas of resource allocation, utilization, and throughput.
Benefits
Benefits Include:
- Reduced average patient surgical throughput.
- Decreased financial impact of operating room minutes lost to delays.
- Decreased number of PACU boarders.
- Increased efficiency of block time utilization.
Measures
- Multiple metrics related to procedure volumes including primary and secondary; trends over time by service type and/or provider.
- Metrics related to operations including cases, cancellations, delays, OR minutes and case times.
- Case level details
Data Sources
- EMR
- Operating Room Information System
- Anesthesia Information System
Background
Operating rooms have historically been an area of high profitability. The day to day operations of surgical services remains costly. Due to mounting financial pressures on hospitals, including changes to reimbursement, operating room efficiency and resources allocation are being examined for potential improvement opportunities.
Problem Summary
Historically, preop, operating rooms, and PACU have been and continue to be areas of profitability, but reimbursement changes and other financial pressures stress the need to improve operating room efficiency and resource allocation. A common difficulty in analyzing surgical services operations for improvement is ensuring that metrics align with goals. Separating surgical services data facilitates analysis of specific complex processes along unique operating room process paths.
Use Cases
- Operating room managers striving to increase efficiency of OR throughput with a focus on delays.
- Operating room managers looking to decrease the room turn-around time between surgery cases.
Success Measures
Opportunity Identification
- Identify potential savings through reduction in delays and identification of throughput bottle necks.
Process Improvement
- Increase the percentage of surgical first case on-time starts for scheduled cases by x%.*
- Reduce average room turnover time by x%.*
- Reduce surgical cancellation rates due to missing tests (lab, x-ray, etc.) by x%.*
Outcomes Improvement
- Increase annual growth in surgical cases, due to increased capacity, by x %.*
*percent set by client
