Operating rooms (ORs) are the financial backbone of hospitals, yet outdated scheduling practices and poor OR block utilization can drain valuable resources and increase staff burnout.
During a March Becker’s Hospital Review webinar sponsored by LeanTaaS, Joel Shaw, MD, vice president for clinical affairs at OhioHealth Grant Medical Center (Columbus), discussed how adopting LeanTaaS’ iQueue for Operating Rooms helped his organization tackle numerous OR inefficiencies.
Three key insights:
- OhioHealth Grant Medical Center is a Level One trauma center with full staffing, but often faced challenges with OR utilization. At times, operating rooms and staff were underutilized, leading to inefficiencies that impacted patients, surgeons and the hospital’s financial health. The high staffing levels drove up labor costs, yet the lack of consistent OR usage reduced revenue. On the other hand, when all surgeons were on-site and case volumes surged, staff found themselves overwhelmed, struggling to keep up with demand.
A consistent and costly inefficiency was the habit of surgeons going on vacation but still not releasing their pre-booked OR blocks. This prevented other surgeons, including newly recruited surgeons, from using the ORs and forced these doctors to place patients on long waiting lists. “Despite knowing that there were going to be surgeons out of town, our process did not work to fill in that time with surgeons who weren’t on break,” Dr. Shaw recalled.
The hospital also faced the problem of inaccurate case length predictions, since it did not have a process to adjust predictions in real time as individual cases evolved. This led to staff working overtime to compensate for discrepancies, leading to more staff burnout and fatigue. Outdated paper and fax-based processes and communication gaps between the OhioHealth system’s private physician offices and OhioHealth Grant Medical Center’s OR schedulers compounded these problems.
- Solving for OR inefficiencies was an advanced math problem that required accurate real-time data. This included data about workflows (case volume, case duration), ORs (likelihood of use, block utilization) and staff (matching schedules to demand and experience to case complexity). OhioHealth needed a solution that could not only retrieve and visualize this data but also leverage expert-driven predictive and prescriptive analytics to optimize OR block utilization.
LeanTaaS’ iQueue for Operating Rooms solution met those requirements by enabling surgeons and others to view granular OR utilization data, as well as to access and reserve open OR time. These capabilities were supported by iQueue’s AI-powered marketplace-like feature, which allowed surgeons to proactively release and book time blocks, along with sending timely notifications.
“What we found with LeanTaaS was a team who was willing to work with us where we were, bring their expertise and solutions but also allow us to be part of the problem-solving,” Dr. Shaw said. As an example of that collaborative approach, he recalled how LeanTaaS helped the leadership team reframe one of the organization’s main goals as block optimization rather than block utilization. “It was the first step to getting buy-in [for implementing iQueue] from our surgeons, some of whom were frustrated with the ‘block utilization’ concept.”
- Partnering with a trusted vendor is key to operationalizing data-driven transformation. OhioHealth Grant Medical Center’s partnership with LeanTaaS led to remarkable results. After implementing iQueue, the medical facility increased OR block utilization by 11% and prime-time OR utilization by 7% year over year, in part due to a 23% decrease in entire blocks going unused. This created an additional 148,000 minutes available for surgeon use; 38% of proactively released time was filled by other surgeons.
In addition, overall case length accuracy predictions improved by 6%, while accuracy for case lengths within a 15-minute window improved by 70%. “We were able to get to a point of looking at each provider and the volume of cases they do in a given procedure to get accurate time predictions, as opposed to what we had before, which was the office manager predicting how long a case would take,” Dr. Shaw said.
In financial terms, the partnership yielded a 10X return on investment.
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