Balancing staff productivity with open OR time
With hospitals under ever greater economic pressure, perioperative managers are expected to hew closely to staffing productivity targets, meaning they must match staffing as closely as possible to the hours of surgery actually performed. They’re also expected to grow surgical volume. Hospitals’ revenue depends on it. To grow volume, ORs…
Lean: Tackling waste in the sterile supply area
When Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center and Children’s Hospital in Spokane, Washington, decided to tackle waste and inefficiencies in its 4,400 square-foot-case cart and sterile supply room, leaders set modest goals for improvement: increase case picking productivity by 4% and relocate enough items to create 6 carts of space for…
Surgeons', anesthesiologists' perceptions of turnover times
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,…
An engineer's eye on turnover time
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%.…
Practical project to improve on-time starts
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…
OR logistics: Learning from FedEx
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…
Practicing 'wasteology' in the OR
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…
Parallel processing to reduce OR time
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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