Your ASC will waste money and annoy your surgeons, anesthesiologists and staff members if your schedule has huge holes of time when no patients are scheduled. Vicki Edelman, administrator of Blue Bell (Pa.) Surgery Center, offers some insight on keeping your OR schedule as tight as possible.
Q: How do you eliminate downtime between cases and keep your schedule as fully-booked as possible?
Vicki Edelman: We spend a lot of time trying to compress our OR schedule and make it efficient. That's the model that works best for our anesthesiologists and surgeons. They don't want to be wasting time or paying someone to sit in the center for two hours between cases. When you have a start-up facility and your patient load is variable, that's when you run into dissatisfaction with your anesthesia group. Especially if you don't have insurance contracts and you're an out-of-network facility, the key thing to do is to compress your OR schedule.
This might mean closing for one day a week. You don't want to have five cases one day and twenty cases on another day.
We look at our schedule at least a week in advance, and if we see that a physician isn't scheduling cases, we call him to check in. If he's on vacation, we can tell the other doctors, "We need more cases that day, or we're going to have to move that day's scheduled cases to another day." We're pro-active early on, but we don't start too early. You need to give doctors time to schedule office hours and schedule patients for surgery.
Learn more about Blue Bell Surgery Center.
Q: How do you eliminate downtime between cases and keep your schedule as fully-booked as possible?
Vicki Edelman: We spend a lot of time trying to compress our OR schedule and make it efficient. That's the model that works best for our anesthesiologists and surgeons. They don't want to be wasting time or paying someone to sit in the center for two hours between cases. When you have a start-up facility and your patient load is variable, that's when you run into dissatisfaction with your anesthesia group. Especially if you don't have insurance contracts and you're an out-of-network facility, the key thing to do is to compress your OR schedule.
This might mean closing for one day a week. You don't want to have five cases one day and twenty cases on another day.
We look at our schedule at least a week in advance, and if we see that a physician isn't scheduling cases, we call him to check in. If he's on vacation, we can tell the other doctors, "We need more cases that day, or we're going to have to move that day's scheduled cases to another day." We're pro-active early on, but we don't start too early. You need to give doctors time to schedule office hours and schedule patients for surgery.
Learn more about Blue Bell Surgery Center.