Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) lines have numerous clinical, operational and financial benefits for healthcare organizations.
But to realize their full potential, MIS must be properly implemented, optimized and communicated.
During Becker's 10th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, in a workshop sponsored by Intuitive, Matthew Carroll, senior director for market access and custom analytics at Intuitive, discussed how strategically operationalized robotic service lines can help providers elevate care standards, increase surgeons' satisfaction and improve return on invested resources and capital.
Three key insights were:
1.) Minimally invasive care can help organizations achieve the Quadruple Aim. A key element of the Quadruple Aim is improving the provider experience. MIS programs can contribute to achieving the Quadruple Aim by expanding the potential of physicians to treat surgical patients while reducing constraints and complications associated with open surgery, such as increased length of stay and ICU admissions. MIS programs can also drive alignment among organizations' other pillars of success, which encompass finances, growth, people, quality and safety initiatives and service.
In particular, Intuitive helps coordinate these efforts by blending quantified performance capabilities, a unified ecosystem that enables MIS procedures and integrated intelligence that serves as a source of actionable digital insights across the care continuum. "Intuitive's technology is a complement to your own process improvement teams and in-house solutions," Mr. Carroll said.
2.) Intuitive's platform is powered by EMR, OR and financial data. Data incorporated in Intuitive's platform includes:
- EMR data on patient demographics, diagnoses, procedures, outcomes and quality metrics.
- OR data such as in and out times, cut-to-close times, instrument use and OR notes.
- Financial data such as costs, diagnosis-related groups, reimbursement and margins.
The distinctive capability of Intuitive's platform is that it unites and "flattens out" these data points, which are currently disjointed and sit in disparate warehouses.
3.) BRG's experience highlights the value of Intuitive's MIS platform beyond da Vinci robots. As of 2018, Baton Rouge General (BRG) — a 600-bed, 3,700-employee teaching hospital in Baton Rouge, La. — had two da Vinci MIS systems and 26 surgeons across nine specialties vying for operating room time to use them. Despite interest in using these systems, OR block utilization and management were suboptimal and led to 106 idle days per da Vinci system that year, while 25 percent of BRG da Vinci-appropriate interventions were performed at a competitor.
BRG tasked its newly recruited CEO with improving surgical resource utilization and stemming the loss of market share. By teaming up with an operational leader, the CEO — who had gone through Intuitive's Executive Surgeon Leader program — identified key obstacles to BRG's da Vinci program: lack of data transparency, lack of executive alignment and support, no organizational structure and block schedule challenges, among others.
By leveraging Intuitive's unified ecosystem of data and insights, the organization was able to conduct a comprehensive da Vinci program value analysis, optimize the infrastructure the program relied on (including block utilization and inventory management) and develop a growth strategy based on strong service line recognition.
As a result, in 2021 BRG boasted a 44 percent productivity gain, in part thanks to more than halving the number of idle days per MIS to 52. It also saw a 19 percent reduction in open surgeries, a 690-day bed savings, an 18 percent increase in contribution margin per day stay and a 50 percent gain in splitter surgeon practice.
"This [approach] can be applied to any one of your service lines, not just to da Vinci," Mr. Carroll said.
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