Editor's Note Hospitals and healthcare systems across the nation experienced their 10th consecutive month of negative profit margins, according to data Kaufman Hall released in a report on November 30, the American Hospital Association November 30 reports. The report notes that the pressures of increased expenses is a key driver…

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Editor's Note The OR Manager Conference program committee is seeking presentation proposals for the 2023 conference, to be held September 18–20 at Music City Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Perioperative leaders who have experience or a story to share in the following categories are encouraged to submit a proposal by December…

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I met Jim at one of our first West Coast OR Manager Conferences in San Francisco in the early 90s. He was a speaker that year, and we were seated at the same table at the Speaker’s Dinner. Jim was still in the Navy and was wearing his white uniform.…

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COVID-19 was a catalyst that helped accelerate innovation in healthcare by a decade, says Jay Banerjee, chief operating officer and cofounder of ImmersiveTouch, a virtual reality (VR) surgery company in Chicago. “Many things that would have taken 20 to 30 years happened sooner,” Banerjee says. “Telemedicine; electronic health records; remote…

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The St Elizabeth Healthcare organization in northern Kentucky has eight facilities, including two surgery centers. The flagship hospital on the Edgewood campus has 534 beds and 22 ORs and typically performs some 14,000 surgical procedures per year. Robots help manage the volume. The Edgewood, Florence, and Ft Thomas hospitals have…

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Imagine this: As a nurse in the OR talks with a patient, a computer listens in, recording the nurse’s notes so that data are added automatically to be retrieved later. The surgeon and anesthesiologist also interact with the patient without the burden of manual data entry, and the insurance company…

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Consider the following requests posed to OR scheduling staff by surgeons: • “I need two blocks in different rooms to accommodate my daily case volume.” • “Can’t I just use that empty room to start my next case while the first case is wrapping up?” Surgeon requests like these are…

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David Shapiro, MD, who is a risk manager/medical director at several ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) near Tallahassee, Florida, has seen his fair share of contracts with anesthesia services. Navigating these types of contracts at a time when anesthesiology is suffering from a workforce shortage and high costs for services is…

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Editor's Note The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on November 10 issued a report outlining its plans, “for the first time,” to improve the transparency, accountability, and completeness of health equity data across its programs. “CMS defines health equity data as the combination of quantitative and qualitative elements…

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Editor's Note This study led by researchers at Yale New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut, finds that many patients have unplanned hospital visits within 7 days of outpatient surgical procedures performed in hospital outpatient departments (HOPDs), often for potentially preventable reasons. The analysis included 1,135,441 outpatient surgical procedures performed at…

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