Successful capacity management is a significant challenge for OR leaders because OR supply is fixed while demand is highly unpredictable. Additionally, optimizing capacity based on block utilization has not been effective because of a lack of usable data, visibility, and transparency.

A more effective approach to optimizing capacity is leveraging predictive and prescriptive analytics and changing the way an organization thinks about utilization. Community Health Systems (CHS) has transformed its culture through a combined focus on people, processes, and technology. By creating a new vision around OR capacity management, CHS has increased partnership, collaboration, standardization, and consistency—and is using iQueue from LeanTaaS to provide actionable data. The result is increased visibility and transparency, as well as overall improved OR capacity utilization.

In a recent webinar, Austin Trout and Ashley Walsh (both from LeanTaaS) described the challenges associated with OR capacity, the foundational elements of a data-driven culture, and the role of predictive and prescriptive analytics in OR decision making. Emily Tchiblakian shared the journey to a data-driven culture at Community Health Systems.

In this Executive Summary, you’ll learn that the fundamental problem in OR capacity management is that supply of time is inflexible and demand is almost impossible to predict.

• There is an inherent mismatch between this supply and demand.
• Supply is almost always limited and consistent.
• Demand will vary, based on multiple factors outside of an organization’s control.