Pilot OR achieves faster, safer hip replacements

Editor's Note

A hospital system in Canada is pioneering a safer, more efficient approach to anterior hip replacements that could become a model for improving flow and addressing surgical backlogs, Hospital News reported on December 28.

Developed by Humber River Health in Toronto, the Hyper-Throughput Operating Room leverages lean processing and teamwork to reduce wait time and surgical backlogs without compromising patient outcomes. “Hyper-Throughput Operating Rooms break down each step within the process and evaluate its effectiveness – leaning out waste and introducing the concept of parallel processing has allowed micro changes to result in big time savings,” explained Jhanvi Solanki, vice president of clinical programs.

In the fourth and most recent pilot of the Hyper-Throughput Operating room, all patients who underwent hip replacements in the Hyper-Throughput Operating Room had no complications, were discharged the same day and bypassed the PACU. The first successful pilot was conducted in October.

Although the team emphasizes that this high-throughput approach will not work for all procedures, Humber is working to transfer lessons learned across as many surgical procedures as possible.