As improvements are made in healthcare and its systems, surgeries and recovery periods grow shorter, but that's not the only way practices can increase their efficiency.
Scott DeNegre, PhD, senior vice president and chief performance officer at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, joined "Becker's ASC Review Podcast" and shared how a system overhaul allowed for more efficiency and flexibility in physicians' schedules.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full podcast episode here.
Question: How did automating your operations management improve things?
Dr. Scott DeNegre: There were three specific challenges we were trying to overcome. It was very challenging for the team to manage being in an outdated and archaic world. Applying an operations management system sped up all of the administration of the OR schedule. Overnight, they went from a paper process to one that was quickly digitally enabled.
Number two, it allowed us to expedite a process that would take weeks to months just to get basic determinations of how well the OR was being used. All of a sudden it was fully automated for us. So all the data, every single case that gets scheduled and every exchange of time now flows through a single system.
The analytics team that used to be inundated with requests for this data and spent a lot of time pulling data out of the manual systems and combining it in Excel, they had their world automated overnight. That allowed them to switch to actually using the data to make better decisions to allocate time.
The third area was really focused on our surgeons and their ability to have flexibility in their practices and have full visibility over the OR schedule. Historically, the only way they could understand where time was available was to request time through email or phone calls. They would wait a day or two to hear back whether that time was available. Days would pass, and all of a sudden you had time that sat empty for four or five days when there was clearly demand from the surgeons and from the patients.
And the results was that there was time that could have been used and should have been used that ultimately went unused, simply because of a lack of visibility, not knowing what was available, and then slow processes to assign that time to people that could actually use it.