Weathering the Storm
Do you know if you have the right processes in place so your hospital has a profitable and highly efficient operating room?
Do you have a process improvement plan to move the dial forward?
Does your organization routinely establish metric measurements before you make a change?
We all know that healthcare challenges are like weathering a storm, and they have gotten bigger and tougher to problem-solve and improve.?
When I worked at a large teaching hospital improvements could always be worked on, so we created an annual work plan with goals to keep us focused on our targets and not become distracted or stalled with the daily needs that demanded attention.
Today, I’ll share one of our successes, which was improving First Case On-Time Starts. Before we started, our baseline was 30%, well below the national median of 64%. Multiple reasons existed for our late start times, but one major one that was identified was multiple surgeons arriving late. We even had one individual who would routinely arrive up to three hours later than his first case scheduled start time. Due to the pattern of tardiness from multiple individuals, the rest of the operating room team didn’t have a strong desire to ensure the prep work for an on-time start was completed in a timely manner. In short, we had a very expensive problem and pattern.
To begin to address this issue, we took a three-pronged approach. We formed a multidisciplinary team consisting of key stakeholders, measured our baseline data, and looked for root causes.?Using a PDSA (Plan, Do, Study, Act) process, we tackled the work. We shared our progress on an ongoing basis with all the OR key stakeholders.?Each role was held accountable to the same standards.?I am happy to share that it worked! The end-result was steady improvement over a six-month period of time to get our first case on-time starts over 90% and then leveling off to a sustainable 88%.?By making this improvement we estimated that we were saving the hospital approximately $190,000 each year.
What I learned from this improvement project is that no matter what you are trying to improve, metrics are important and they do several things:
●?????Tell us if we are moving in the right direction
●?????Demonstrating improvement to key stakeholders
●?????Decreasing resistance to change
●?????Exposing any unintended consequences
Whether you are working on improvements or not, there is a price associated.?What would have been the cost if we had just accepted our current state as normal or too hard to improve? With OR downtime costing over $100 a minute, the stakes are higher than ever. To achieve a high-performing OR you must be measuring key performance indicators and actively working on improving, remaining idle and in the status quo are not the keys for success.?
So is your hospital riding the waves and weathering the storm or being drawn down under them?
If you need more assistance please reach out, my expertise is in helping teams make and sustain improvements.?
Contact me at [email protected]?or 651-764-6232 or check out my website.
P.S. Always remember to measure where you started so you can see where you have gone!