At the Becker’s Hospital Review 6th Annual Meeting May 8, Jeffry Peters, president of Surgical Directions, and David Young, MD, medical director of pre-surgical testing at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Ill., discussed how perioperative services can improve hospital performance.
“Typically, in better-performing hospitals, perioperative services generate about 55 to 65 percent of the bottom line,” said Mr. Peters. “So if you do well in perioperative services, you do well as a hospital or system.”
According to Mr. Peters, hospitals and health systems with successful perioperative services also have:
- A collaborative governance structure
- Information that is both comprehensive and transparent
- Engaged physicians, nurses and administrative leaders
- A strong focus on new innovative care delivery models
- Processes that prioritize enhanced OR efficiency
- Lower costs; and
- An uncompromised focus on clinical excellence
To operationalize transformation in the OR and in perioperative services, Dr. Young suggests starting with a huddle to address problems and opportunities.
“We decided to bring everyone to the table, including pre-anesthesia testing workers, an anesthesiologist, nurse navigators for surgery, sterile processing workers and admission unit nurses, to run through every single case from the previous day and identify issues we were having so we could avoid them the next day,” said Dr. Young.
According to Dr. Young, the huddle has helped the Advocate Lutheran General perioperative team make a lot of good catches over the years that may have otherwise caused the team to stumble. For instance, the team cut the patient cancellations in half.
In addition to conducting daily huddles, Mr. Peters and Dr. Young suggested looking into implementing a perioperative surgical home, recruiting physician or clinician champions to support improvement efforts and measuring processes and outcomes using data dashboards.
