Realizing ROI from AI for surgical operations: The Baptist Health, Jacksonville story

Operating room (OR) utilization is a key revenue driver for hospitals and health systems.

Yet, many organizations continue to use legacy management systems that assign OR block time inefficiently. These systems rely on static, backward-looking, manually entered, error-prone data that does not necessarily reflect the reality of clinical workflows. As a result, OR capacity and patient flow get artificially constrained even when there are sufficient resources to increase them. 

During a February Becker's Hospital Review webinar sponsored by LeanTaaS, Sanjeev Agrawal, president and chief operating officer of LeanTaaS, moderated a discussion with Aaron Miri, chief digital and information officer at Baptist Health (Jacksonville, Fla.), about how organizations can increase OR utilization and boost revenues by implementing a modern, AI-powered OR block management solution.

Three key insights were:

1. Hospitals need an OR management solution with predictive and prescriptive capabilities. An effective OR management system must be able to capture and show real-time OR utilization data, detect patterns of utilization and tell OR schedulers prescriptively the optimal way to allocate block time. For that, the system must combine actionable artificial intelligence with workflow automation, complemented by adequate change management processes.

   "I cannot stress enough the importance of having insight, trust and technologies that work with you, not against you," Mr. Miri said.
   
   

2. By partnering with LeanTaaS, Baptist Health increased OR utilization, case volume and quality. LeanTaaS' AI-powered iQueue platform monitors OR usage, staffing and multiple other data points across the organization in real time, then leverages AI to predict and prescribe optimal block allocation.

   Baptist Health launched iQueue in late 2019, coinciding with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. To date, the impact has been significant, leading to:

   1. A 28 percent decrease in unused OR block time in FY23 (i.e., OR time that often went unused but that was not released proactively), compared to pre-iQueue baseline.
   2. A 9 percent increase in primetime OR utilization by ensuring that the right cases are assigned to the right ORs for the right duration of time during prime business hours.
   3. Optimized robot utilization (e.g., 75 percent increase in robotic minutes in Q1 2023 vs Q1 2019) by leveraging analytics to identify and repurpose underutilized robot blocks.
   4. A 3 percent increase in case volume and a 6 percent increase in case minutes (a proxy for care quality) in FY22 compared to FY19.
      
      
3. A trust-based vendor partnership is critical to realizing operational and strategic gains. For this Jacksonville-based health system, one of the top strategic benefits of partnering with LeanTaaS has been the ability to visualize data about all pieces of the OR care continuum — including block utilization, case volume, staffing allocation, first case on-time start or delay length, 24-hour cancellations and turnover length — in one place, which facilitates decision-making about operations or policies that may need to be modified.
   
   "When we have data that's actionable, we're able to revamp how OR block committees work, rewrite system policies and onboard new staff faster," Mr. Miri said. He added that the partnership has also benefited Baptist through feedback LeanTaaS provides about best practices used by others that have implemented iQueue. "Maybe there's a hospital system in California that is doing a great job, so if we can bring it here to Florida, let's do it."

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