For ORs wanting to achieve best-in-class status, transforming your operations makes for deep, enterprise-wide change — the redesigning of all processes on the perioperative continuum. By doing so, you can achieve more fundamental and dramatic results than if you were to change any single, tactical area.

Even with strategies that improve performance, most ORs struggle to get and sustain significant gains. Staff is often frustrated by ongoing efforts with less than desirable progress — the result of taking a too-narrow look at one area, issue or process.

Instead, using a comprehensive methodology with supporting IT tools will help achieve dramatic, sustainable targets. Consider using redesigned processes across the OR spectrum. Base your efforts on best practice goals that are well-articulated by OR leadership and measured with key performance indicators. Use IT to measure, monitor and track process and sub-process changes.

Treating the OR as an enterprise and making multiple, concurrent changes is the only road to meeting goals that are sustainable.

Consider how you might use performance data to manage your OR operations.

Every week, OR staff can receive performance data via customized dashboards. These reports contain myriad data views at a summary or granular level, measuring sub-processes along the perioperative continuum. Staff can meticulously analyze any function, process or area.

Taking this to a logical next step, the question is – what now? The available data can be incredibly robust and you will need to know where to focus your efforts.

This is where EMPATH IT shines – measure the data to manage performance. Our systems identify which processes have the greatest opportunity for improvement, and help create action plans for the week. You can monitor process improvement, process variability, and distance from the target. Individual trend lines and targets are identified for more than 70 perioperative operational cycle times.

This entire process – review, analysis, action – becomes embedded into the organization as a consistent approach to managing with data. It gives you the ability to easily monitor critical operational measurements and to identify potential issues before they become problems.

Best performing OR staff are tuned to minutes in their work. They strive to reach expected targets for every process and subprocess. They know that slight variances off target mean a cascading effect that will impact downstream processes and take a toll on room turnover, on-time starts, surgeon efficiency and patient satisfaction.

Having the right methods and IT systems in place will allow you to track processes, minute to minute, and to see the variances on performance on a real-time basis.

EMPATH IT delivers the means to monitor and the action plans to respond to variations in performance. By decreasing process and time variability, you can significantly decrease overall OR patient length of stay.

We have had a client achieve almost 90 minutes of reduced perioperative LOS, with the SAU, intraop and PACU areas each seeing significant reduction in cycle times. This has increased the number of cases performed in an individual OR suite, has allowed surgeons to finish earlier, and has decreased costs per case.

When well-defined processes and IT are paired, hospital staff can achieve remarkable outcomes. Before working with EMPATH, a current client had OR first cases starting only 30% on time. Now, first-case on-time starts have increased to 80% and they are well on the way to achieving their 95% target. Concurrent with this success, turnover time between cases now averages 21 minutes, down from 32 minutes.

 

EMPATH Inc. 1160 Brickyard Cove Road, Ste. 110 Richmond, CA 94804
(888) 4EMPATH (510) 215-6220
web: www.empath.md email: info@empath.md
If you wish to be removed from our mailing list please click here