The financial stability of healthcare systems depends on maximizing operating room efficiency.
A single minute in the operating room can be worth over $100 — and a block of time up to $50,000.
Unfortunately, efforts to resolve the complex operational challenges associated with OR utilization often fail or are unsustainable.
During a Becker's Hospital Review webinar sponsored by LeanTaaS, Sanjeev Agrawal, president and COO of LeanTaaS, and Brian Dawson, system vice president of perioperative services at Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health, discussed how organizations can transform perioperative performance through the right combination of technology, processes and change management expertise.
Four key takeaways were:
- Procedural areas form the financial backbone of hospitals and health systems. If healthcare leaders don't focus on and identify opportunities to use their assets more effectively, they are leaving revenue on the table. "As an OR leader and a healthcare executive, I want to market unused and unreleased OR block time to surgeons in our network and at competitor organizations," Mr. Dawson said. "In this way, we can be good stewards of our resources and use them to grow business in our communities."
- To transform operations, healthcare leaders must focus on the "magic equation." Technology alone isn't enough. "If a C-suite executive wants to transform operations in the OR, on the inpatient side or in the cancer center, they must keep three elements in mind," Mr. Agrawal said. "They need a technology platform, clean data and people who are willing to do things differently. You won't achieve ROI until those things are in place."
- Specific, relevant KPIs are an essential part of change management. At CommonSpirit Health, change management has been the most challenging aspect of the LeanTaaS rollout. "You can have the greatest AI and the cleanest data, but if the team doesn't focus on the KPIs, it doesn't matter," Mr. Dawson said. CommonSpirit Health's nationwide key performance indicators around block management and surgeon engagement are drilled down to individual facilities in a scorecard that is measured monthly. "This information shows where we need to assist hospitals that are struggling with unused and unreleased block time," Mr. Dawson said. The organization also analyzes staffed room utilization to measure productivity.
- LeanTaaS has changed the operational and financial landscape at CommonSpirit Health. CommonSpirit Health operates in 21 states and uses LeanTaaS at all of the organization's non-critical access facilities. "We've generated $40 million in revenue — 16 times the ROI for the LeanTaaS tool. Even so, there is four times that amount of revenue that we're still leaving on the table. We're working to capture that as we expand the use of LeanTaaS and generate more data," Mr. Dawson said.
To provide world-class healthcare to people who need it, where they need it, healthcare leaders have to think outside the box. "What we've done in the past won't work today," Mr. Dawson said. "We must understand our markets and our operations; otherwise, we'll make decisions based on fear rather than data."
The results to date at CommonSpirit Health demonstrate the operational and financial benefits of using a data-driven system and changing the culture to transform perioperative performance.
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