When it comes to matching the supply of operating room staff to the unpredictable demands of surgery schedules, health systems face daunting challenges.
In many hospitals and health systems, the OR planning process is still often reactive and time consuming.
During a recent Becker's Healthcare webinar sponsored by LeanTaaS, two experts on OR staffing discussed how Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is using strategic staffing insights and automated workflows to proactively optimize staff planning, transform OR staffing practices, and save staff 25 hours per week:
- Dio Sumagaysay, RN, vice president, perioperative & multi-specialty procedural services, OHSU
- Stacey Leadbeater, senior product manager, LeanTaaS
Three key takeaways were:
- Traditional approaches to OR staffing are inefficient. At OHSU, service line coordinators handle OR staff assignments. This work is encumbered by many manual processes and duplicative work. As a result, it frequently takes more than one hour per day for each coordinator to complete OR staff assignments.
"There is no single source of truth," Mr. Sumagaysay said. "Service coordinators rely on many different tools and silos of knowledge about staff experience." Insufficient information makes it difficult to assign floating staff and orientees, as well as to accelerate staff training opportunities.
- iQueue for Operating Rooms' Staff Planner supports a proactive approach to OR staffing. In 2018, OHSU deployed iQueue for Operating Rooms to improve OR block time utilization. Based on the success with this tool, the team decided to launch an early adopter program for the new Staff Planner for Staffing Optimization module.
"Staff Planner is a digital tool that streamlines and automates daily OR and assignment workflows," Ms. Leadbeater said. "This all-in-one tool integrates with the EHR scheduling system and learning management system to pull pieces together for efficient and complete OR assignments."
Real-time case history is available for each staff member at the point of assignment, providing full transparency into each person's experience with procedures and surgeons. Recommendations and training opportunities are surfaced based on the surgical schedule, optimizing assignments and accelerating staff training.
- OHSU's early adopters report significant process improvements thanks to iQueue Staff Planner. Nursing leaders are saving over 25 hours per week on daily staffing, resulting in more time that can be spent on patient care. Staff Planner supports more equitable and informed staffing decisions, since it provides automated access to full case history at the point of assignment.
In a video interview, Erika Scott, surgical service coordinator at OHSU's Center for Health and Healing, said, "With the new iQueue Staff Planner, we can look at the staff, see how many cases they've done and whether they're knowledgeable about that kind of case. This allows us to place staff appropriately in the operating rooms. It's also been very beneficial in helping us cross-train staff to fill in gaps. iQueue is going really smoothly and we like it."
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