Lean management and automation have come together to create a sterile processing department (SPD) that can efficiently process the 700 to 1,000 instrument sets a day needed to support a caseload that is primarily orthopedic. The SPD at New England Baptist Hospital in Boston is one of the few in…
An electronic form surgeons’ offices use to place scheduling orders has streamlined the preoperative process and sharply reduced case cancellations for a Chicago-area hospital. Cancellations are down from about 12% to less than 1% of cases since the scheduling form was introduced in early 2012. The offices took to the…
A 65-year-old man with heart disease schedules a knee arthroscopy with his orthopedic surgeon. Thirty miles away, a note pops up to notify the hospital’s presurgical clinic of the impending surgery. A nurse practitioner pulls up the patient’s electronic health record (EHR), where she reviews the patient’s history. Comparing the…
Preop “nurse navigators” aided by an electronic tool are helping a Pennsylvania health system create a more standardized, user-friendly preoperative process for preparing patients for surgery. A cornerstone of the process is evidence-based guidelines for preop evaluation developed by a 50-person task force. “We wanted to optimize our approach so…