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Hospitals can reduce costs and enhance the quality of care in their operating rooms by using data analytics to monitor performance, identify improvement opportunities, alter processes, and measure the efficacy of changes.
For most hospitals, the operating room (OR) is a leading revenue generator. But many factors can conspire to negatively affect OR financial performance- from case start delays to lengthy turnover times to inefficient staff scheduling. Applying perioperative analytics to the streams of data flowing from the OR can lessen those problems and improve the bottom line.
Making Data Actionable
Traditionally, processes have been difficult to quantify within the highly variable OR environment, in part because available data traditionally are presented in the form of fairly static reports. These reports offer a single snapshot of what has happened over time-much like the dashboard indicators on a car reveal the number of miles traveled and how much gas is left. They tell little about how many trips the car has made or how it performed in traffic during specific hours or days.
Even advanced reports lack the ability to explain the factors that drive trends. Providing such insight is the purview of true analytics and business intelligence.
Take one not-for-profit, 250-bed tertiary hospital OR management team that wanted to lower its time between cases. Raw data that included the actual schedule and actual case times were analyzed based on industrystandard definitions of how to calculate turnover time. With these data in hand, the team evaluated variations in turnover times by service line, type of procedure, surgeon, time of day, circulator running the case, and other factors. Patterns emerged, revealing that turnover times-as well as intraoperative times-dropped when the cases associated with one particular service line, bariatric surgery, were analyzed independently rather than comingled with the rest of the cases. When these cases were segmented out, it became apparent that turnover times were more in line with hospital targets, although there was still room for improvement.
The team conducted a pilot test in which the bariatric surgery service line was moved into a three-room wing of its own in the OR. The same teams performed the same procedures there every day. Data analysis after this sequestration showed an eight-minute decline in turnover minutes for all other...