Hospitals are facing unparalleled financial challenges.
Demand for surgical services continues to rise while resources and staff remain tight. Optimizing OR capacity is paramount to delivering high-quality patient care, high levels of staff satisfaction and good financial results.
During a Becker's Hospital Review webinar sponsored by LeanTaaS, Brian Dawson, system vice president of perioperative services at Chicago-based CommonSpirit, described how the "magic formula" of AI, workflow automation and change management has delivered growth, ROI and "systemness" — the practice of providing consistent patient, provider and staff experience across a health system driven by common operational processes, tools, policies and procedures.
CommonSpirit is a partnership between Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives, with 2,200 care sites and more than 20 million patient encounters per year.
Four key takeaways were:
- CommonSpirit was focused on decreasing unused operating room (OR) minutes. In FY22, CommonSpirit had 9.6 million unused OR minutes, which represented an enormous opportunity cost. "We were able to produce for our finance department, by facility, how much time we left on the table based on those unreleased, unfilled minutes," Mr. Dawson said. CommonSpirit determined that recouping 25% of these unused minutes was worth $93 million and recouping 50% of them was worth $186 million.
By working with LeanTaaS and implementing its AI-powered iQueue for Operating Rooms solution, CommonSpirit has started capturing additional revenue previously trapped in unused block time. Throughout 2021 and 2022, case volumes and case minutes were sustained, despite COVID, and both increased significantly in January 2023. In addition, primetime utilization was also sustained and staffed room utilization has increased significantly. - Reducing unused OR minutes requires greater perioperative systemness. Improving systemwide performance requires "systemness." Building systemness at CommonSpirit meant:
- Getting the right people on board, which included engaging surgeons.
- Implementing the right technology (EMR agnostic) to produce accurate real-time operational data.
- Building relationships with partners who know the business, provide ongoing support and drive innovation.
CommonSpirit concluded that systemness resulted from a "magic formula" that combined AI with data hygiene and workflow automation along with change management.
- Technology is not enough; systemness also requires people and processes. Systemness starts with gaining the support of the key people throughout the organization, which often requires change management.
At CommonSpirit, change management focused on convincing leaders of the power of AI and the valuable data it generated. "We spent a lot of time educating our executives and leaders at the facility level, as well as our strategy and finance folks at the division level and our most senior executives. We brought everybody together to understand the value of LeanTaaS, and the value of the data this tool provides," Mr. Dawson said.
Systemness at CommonSpirit also required a collaborative mentality, a change in culture to promote consistent experiences, standard policies, processes and metrics, and access to accurate, visible and transparent data. - For CommonSpirit, LeanTaaS is more than a vendor; it is a partner. LeanTaaS's solution is EMR agnostic, pulling data from multiple EMR systems. "Our LeanTaaS customer success managers serve as consultants . . . to help our facilities," Mr. Dawson said. "They help us look at the data and make the right moves to reprioritize blocks, set auto block releases and look at historical booking patterns. As a result, we're moving blocks to the appropriate need, right-sizing blocks among surgeons and marketing additional blocks to other providers in our network."
Achieving greater systemness has delivered a tremendous ROI for CommonSpirit. By implementing LeanTaaS’ iQueue for Operating Rooms solution, while more effectively leveraging the organization's people and processes, CommonSpirit has achieved a return of 16 times its investment, producing more than $40 million by recouping unused OR minutes.
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