To unlock an operating room's full potential, building trust and engagement with surgeons is essential.
Data transparency — with near-real-time access to data — is critical to building this trust. By leveraging technology that facilitates this data transparency, healthcare facilities and surgery centers can streamline case scheduling and increase their operating room availability.
During a recent Becker's Hospital Review webinar sponsored by LeanTaaS, three executives from Lexington Medical Center shared staffing and OR access challenges that were exacerbated during the pandemic, described what they did to address those challenges and summarized the benefits this health system has experienced.
Lexington Medical Center is a 607-bed independent, nonprofit health care system in West Columbia, South Carolina. It has 41 operating rooms and reported almost 32,000 surgeries in fiscal 2022.
The participating executives from Lexington Medical Center were:
- Tim FitzGerald, assistant vice president, perioperative services
- Jay D. Hamm, RN, BSN, vice president, operations
- Karen Tisdale, manager, performance analytics
Three key takeaways from this session:
- Lexington Medical Center did not have the data transparency needed to efficiently use its operating rooms. According to Mr. Hamm, staffing deficits during COVID meant that the medical center could not staff all of its operating rooms, causing the health system to run below full capacity. "We were really concerned about our ability to get our needed number of cases done," he said. "We had a lack of data visibility, so it was it was hard for us to advertise to our 60 to 70 surgeons when blocks of time were released."
In addition, there was a lack of surgeon accountability for low block utilization. The health system also experienced a challenge with decisions to reallocate ORs, due to surgeon pushback. These challenges were compounded by delays in gathering and sharing data, lack of visibility into data and low surgeon engagement with OR-related data.
- To address these challenges, Lexington Medical Center had to change its culture and unlock data to facilitate trust and drive smarter decision-making. "We knew we were not going to be successful by continuing with the same approach," Mr. FitzGerald said. "Cultural change is hard, so we sought out a tool that would make it easy to access the data we needed to ensure we could achieve trust and buy-in as well as provide needed visibility."
Lexington Medical Center implemented the iQueue for Operating Rooms platform from LeanTaaS.
"Instead of having a discussion based on an anecdotal example or someone's perception, we're now having honest and straightforward discussions based on relevant data," he said. "Establishing standard definitions and being transparent with the data has been essential to effectively communicating the 'why' behind decision-making."
- This data visibility and an increasing level of trust in the organization have empowered service lines to more effectively manage OR usage and block times. "We switched from a surgeon-owned block mentality to a service line block mentality where we were engaging with our physician network administrators," Ms. Tisdale said. Each service line was assigned a certain OR block to manage, and they are responsible for unlocking availability for their group of surgeons before requesting additional time.
As a result of using iQueue, increasing data visibility and changing the organization's culture and processes, Lexington Medical Center increased its case volume by 3 percent, increased prime time utilization by 4 percent and grew block time utilization by 6 percent. "We also saw a 211 percent increase in release time," Ms. Tisdale said. "That means other surgeons could go in and find the time they need . . . It proved that we were able to do a lot more with a lot fewer resources and set the groundwork to continue to maximize the use of all of our ORs."
Moving forward, Lexington Medical Center will continue to use iQueue to further improve efficiency within its service lines, support new surgeon recruitment and shift appropriate cases from its ORs to its ambulatory service center.
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