Perceptions of turnover times by surgeons and anesthesiologists may be influenced more by a mental model of how team activity influences turnover times than by actual turnover times per se, a new study finds. Researchers from the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate, Syracuse, and the University of Iowa,…

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Airline pilots and race pit crews bring new perspectives to OR throughput, so why not engineers? With the help of a University of Southern California (USC) Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems project, turnover time in 3 California hospitals dropped by an average of 9 minutes, or 21%.…

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A data-driven project dramatically improved on-time starts in our operating rooms at St Boniface General Hospital, a 507-bed academic tertiary care facility in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The previous year's performance had averaged 75%. The goal was set to achieve a 90% rate. Reasons for delays The operating room management, along…

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At 2 am on a cold morning last year, a group of OR leaders from Johns Hopkins stood in the FedEx logistics center in Memphis. They wanted to see what they could learn that could be applied to moving patients through the OR. Two of them also visited Wal-Mart's distribution…

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An academic medical center is practicing "wasteology" to pare time, expense, and hassle from its OR processes. Using lean thinking, the center is streamlining its operations to get more cases done and improve service to patients, physicians, and staff. The University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC) in Seattle has applied…

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Parallel processing—performing some tasks in tandem—is one strategy that helped an Ohio hospital reduce nonoperative time by 37%, from nearly 65 minutes to 42 minutes. Turnover time was reduced by 38%, from about 43 minutes to 26 minutes. The project team analyzed patient flow from the surgeon's office through discharge…

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