For many health systems, the operating room is key to cultivating sustainability — especially when it comes to revenue and staffing.
During a recent Becker's Healthcare panel discussion sponsored by Ambu, four healthcare leaders shared their perspectives on how the operating room factors into health system's financial growth and efficiency strategies, as well as how organizations are navigating pervasive staffing challenges.
The panelists were:
- Eddie Bratko, president, MultiCare Tacoma General and Allenmore Hospitals (Tacoma, Wash.)
- Christian Escobar, vice president of marketing, Ambu USA
- Shawn D. Parekh, PharmD, chief executive officer, Roxborough Memorial Hospital (Philadelphia)
- Mara Rosalsky, vice president of perioperative services, UC Irvine Health (Orange, Calif.)
Four key takeaways were:
1. Key efficiency metrics are different for inpatient and outpatient procedures. UC Irvine Health takes a data-driven approach to measuring performance. In outpatient locations, turnover time is a standard perioperative efficiency metric. However, at the inpatient hospital where complex work is done, room utilization is a key efficiency measure.
"When the average case length is six hours, a 20-minute turn versus a 40-minute one is not as impactful," Ms. Rosalsky said. "Dashboards are incredibly helpful for keeping a real-time finger on the pulse of the organization."
2. Collaboration with providers is essential for perioperative growth. To power its financial turnaround, MultiCare Tacoma General and Allenmore Hospitals are focusing on perioperative growth, length of stay improvement and labor management. "One of our keys to success with perioperative growth was creating a physician-led OR governance process," Mr. Bratko said. "This group meets regularly to talk through metrics like room utilization and they make sure we are doing cases in the right setting."
Collaboration extends to the scheduling staff at local surgical practices, as well as with anesthesiologists, to ensure that procedures are scheduled in the appropriate place and efficiency is maximized for both providers and the facility.
3. Cross-training and career paths are ways to attract and retain OR staff. Roxborough Memorial Hospital's new chief nursing officer has promoted cross-training, which enables staff to shift into new roles. "People who were LPNs are converting to RNs, for example," Mr. Parekh said. "We want to give them opportunities to grow their professional portfolio, do more creative things and feel that they have a career plan." The organization is also using retention bonuses, tuition reimbursement and other programs to recruit students from the two-year RN degree school of nursing that is on the hospital's campus.
4. To maximize productivity, it's important to utilize equipment that streamlines the employee experience and matches the care setting. Single-use endoscopes, for example, enhance the employee experience by enabling surgical services staff to stay on schedule. "These instruments are plug and play, and are always ready, so no one has to run to the GI department to grab an EGD scope or figure out where the bronchoscope is," Mr. Escobar said. In the outpatient setting, organizations often don't have infrastructure like central sterile processing. Ambu's single-use endoscopes align well with these environments. "We want to empower health systems to perform procedures where and when they want to do them, in the most productive way possible,"Mr. Escobar said.
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