As hospitals face growing demands for care, including surgical services, enhancing operating room (OR) efficiency without having to embark on costly expansions is a pressing priority.
During a December Becker's Hospital Review webinar sponsored by LeanTaaS, Rose Andron, RN, unit director at Rush University Medical Center (Chicago), discussed how the hospital tackled longstanding OR challenges to boost prime time and block utilization after partnering with LeanTaaS and adopting their iQueue for Operating Rooms software solution.
Three key insights were:
- Rush faced operational challenges that made ORs hard to access. These challenges stemmed from the fact that OR blocks were viewed as "real estate" that belonged to surgeons, making it difficult to allocate OR time to new surgeons or to schedule more cases until someone released blocks. However, block releases were infrequent since there was a scarcity mentality and no accountability for how block time was managed.
"The inability to hold a block owner accountable meant that time was going unused," Ms. Andron said. "Even if we saw volumes going down in one surgical service and going up in another, we couldn't make any block decisions or changes." These issues were compounded by a lack of timely, actionable data and transparency about surgeon-specific performance. - Rush transformed the culture around OR utilization through data-driven decision-making. The team began by identifying key stakeholders — from surgical chairs to clinic/OR schedulers to perioperative and executive leadership — and brought them together to develop a roadmap to OR optimization. The main goal was to improve access to the OR, as well as increase volume, utilization, efficiency, transparency and visibility.
Rush embarked on this transformation by implementing iQueue's user-friendly OR block release process, which also streamlined workflows to view, access and reserve open OR time. "I compare the system to OpenTable where you can pick your restaurant, identify available times for your reservation and select what's best based on what's currently available," Ms. Andron said.
To complete the access optimization step, Rush provided access to scheduling metrics, which unlocked visibility into surgeon-specific utilization patterns and enabled block allocation based on those patterns. All this allowed the hospital to accommodate more cases by managing fewer ORs per day more efficiently. "[With iQueue] we had a single source of truth that all key stakeholders could access and view at any time," Ms. Andron said. - Partnering with a trusted vendor is key to driving true data-driven transformation. Instilling a data-driven culture and driving true transformation takes more than implementing a technology solution. LeanTaaS offers hospitals and health systems a partnership approach based on sharing best practices and insights from how other other organizations have managed similar challenges, the ability to benchmark against peers to identify areas of focus and ongoing hand-in-hand collaboration to help providers solve their toughest perioperative problems.
Rush's partnership with LeanTaaS has led to remarkable results. Since it implemented iQueue in August 2020, the medical center has increased prime time OR utilization by 4% and OR block utilization by 12%. "Although we no longer make decisions on block utilization alone, it is an important metric to view holistically as well as granularly within each of the departments to continue to optimize block allocation and use of our scarce resources," Ms. Andron concluded.
To learn more, click here.