September 19, 2011
“If the OR is the engine that drives the hospital, anesthesia is the engine that drives the OR – but who is at the wheel? On average, the operating room accounts for up to 70% of hospital revenue; if the OR doesn’t succeed as a business, neither does the hospital. You have likely designated a team and set goals for recruiting surgeons and increasing surgical volume. More than that, you’ve made sure the correct team members are in place and have empowered them to drive the process they are responsible for. However, many hospitals have not taken those same basic steps to ensure the success of their OR suite.
When an OR is underperforming, it is rarely because members of the surgical team aren’t up to their jobs. What’s missing is almost always OR leadership; a competent individual with the tools, experience and authority to drive success. “Leadership” means an accountable point person who manages roles and responsibilities, understands the greater goals of the hospital, and creates a culture that thrives on change/improvement. Historically, successful perioperative directors have come from a variety of disciplines including; nursing, operations and anesthesia. Regardless of the individuals particular path of ascension, there are common themes in excellence that have been uncovered which will be discussed in the following whitepaper.”
Click here to read the full article
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Benchmarking, Leadership, Operating rooms | No Comments
July 5, 2011
“In this policy paper, the BC Medical Association (BCMA) proposes that a coordinated initiative to improve the quality, efficiency, and access to surgical care needs to be implemented across British Columbia…The operating room (OR) and the processes that support the OR make up the perioperative system. A considerable amount of planning, preparation, and coordination within the perioperative system is required to ensure that patients receive quality surgical care that is safe and timely. However, quality and efficiency issues can cause surgical delays, cancellations, adverse events, and suboptimal care for surgical patients. These issues affect the experience and outcomes of surgical patients, the satisfaction of perioperative personnel, and the financial budgets of hospitals.”
Posted in READ Portal, Reports & Papers | Tagged with Access to care, Operating rooms, Process improvement, Quality of care | No Comments
June 27, 2011
“An interactive tool was developed for the ophthalmology department of the Academic Medical Center to quantitatively support management with strategic patient-mix decisions. The tool enables management to alter the number of patients in various patient groups and to see the consequences in terms of key performance indicators. In our case study, we focused on the bottleneck: the operating room. First, we performed a literature review to identify all factors that influence an operating room’s utilization rate. Next, we decided which factors were relevant to our study. For these relevant factors, two quantitative methods were applied to quantify the impact of an individual factor: regression analysis and computer simulation. Finally, the average duration of an operation, the number of cancellations due to overrun of previous surgeries, and the waiting time target for elective patients all turned out to have significant impact. Accordingly, for the case study, the interactive tool was shown to offer management quantitative decision support to act proactively to expected alterations in patient-mix. Hence, management can anticipate the future situation, and either alter the expected patient-mix or expand capacity to ensure that the key performance indicators will be met in the future.”
Posted in Journal Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Efficiency, Operating rooms, Wait lists | No Comments
November 4, 2010
We often marvel at the impact increasingly sophisticated technology has had on medical procedures, pushing the boundaries and turning the improbable into possible.
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Operating rooms, Technology | No Comments
October 27, 2010
In an effort to keep people who undergo major surgery safe, surgeons frequently refer their patients for evaluation by internal medicine specialists before the planned surgery. This evaluation is called a “preoperative medical consultation.”
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Mortality rates, Operating rooms, Safety | No Comments
October 20, 2010
Surgical death rates might be reduced if operating room staff borrowed team-building procedures used by the airline industry, a new study suggests.
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Benchmarking, Operating rooms, Safety | No Comments
October 19, 2010
[The] Morgagni-Pierantoni Hospital in Forlì, Emilia Romagna (Northeast of Italy), has been among the first ones in the country to test the use of surgical checklists… The checklist in the operating room aims to make sure that all the planned safety procedures have been respected and followed before, during and after the surgical interventions.
Posted in Mass Media Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Information technology, Operating rooms, Policy, Safety, Technology | No Comments
September 8, 2010
This paper investigates the trade-off between cancellations of elective surgeries due to semi-urgent surgeries, and unused operating room (OR) time due to excessive reservation of OR time for semi-urgent surgeries.Semi-urgent surgeries, to be performed soon but not necessarily today, pose an uncertain demand on available hospital resources, and interfere with the planning of elective patients. For a highly utilized OR, reservation of OR time for semi-urgent surgeries avoids excessive cancellations of elective surgeries, but may also result in unused OR time, since arrivals of semi-urgent patients are unpredictable. First, using a queuing theory framework, we evaluate the OR capacity needed to accommodate every incoming semi-urgent surgery. Second, we introduce another queuing model that enables a trade-off between the cancelation rate of elective surgeries and unused OR time. Third, based on Markov decision theory, we develop a decision support tool that assists the scheduling process of elective and semi-urgent surgeries. We demonstrate our results with actual data obtained from a department of neurosurgery (Boucherie, et al, 2010).
Posted in Journal Articles, READ Portal | Tagged with Efficiency, Operating rooms | No Comments
Page 1 of 11
