The right strategies can help increase OR utilization
OR Business Performance is a series intended to help OR managers and directors improve the success of their business. How do you improve an OR’s financial performance? Last month’s column focused on two key strategies: using data to identify improvement opportunities and rallying support for organizational change. These strategies…
Benchmarking labor productivity: How is your OR being compared?
Productivity monitoring and management are near the top of the priority list for every perioperative nursing director. With 50% to 80% of a hospital’s costs in labor, staffing dollars are a big target for cost management. Some experts say hospitals and health systems will face budget cuts of 20% to…
Time Busters: A Lean team tackles OR turnover
First of 3 articles on applying Lean management to turnover time. Sinai Hospital of Baltimore faced a challenge. The block schedule was maxed out, even though new ORs had been added. There was a need to eke out every available minute. Despite efforts to improve turnover time, it had plateaued…
Restructuring circulator nurse role aids turnover
Second of 3 articles on applying Lean management to turnover time. Efforts to weed waste from turnover time quickly took root in one 10-OR department. Within about a month after OR staff and certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) embraced the new process, turnover time decreased from about 26 minutes…
Visual cues help to improve the turnover process
Third of 3 articles on applying Lean management to turnover time. Creating a “visual workplace” is a principle in Lean management. Visual cues have been one solution for improving turnover time at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. In a visual workplace, the goal is to make waste, problems,…
Lean boosts OR morale, productivity
Lean management in a teaching hospital’s otolaryngology OR improved efficiency, morale, and finances in a study from the University of Michigan (U-M), Ann Arbor. After 18 months: • turnover time (from exit of one patient to arrival of the next) fell by nearly one-third to 29 minutes • turnaround time…
Balancing staff productivity with open OR time
With hospitals under ever greater economic pressure, perioperative managers are expected to hew closely to staffing productivity targets, meaning they must match staffing as closely as possible to the hours of surgery actually performed. They’re also expected to grow surgical volume. Hospitals’ revenue depends on it. To grow volume, ORs…
Lean: Tackling waste in the sterile supply area
When Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center and Children’s Hospital in Spokane, Washington, decided to tackle waste and inefficiencies in its 4,400 square-foot-case cart and sterile supply room, leaders set modest goals for improvement: increase case picking productivity by 4% and relocate enough items to create 6 carts of space for…
Surgeons', anesthesiologists' perceptions of turnover times
Perceptions of turnover times by surgeons and anesthesiologists may be influenced more by a mental model of how team activity influences turnover times than by actual turnover times per se, a new study finds. Researchers from the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate, Syracuse, and the University of Iowa,…
An engineer's eye on turnover time
Airline pilots and race pit crews bring new perspectives to OR throughput, so why not engineers? With the help of a University of Southern California (USC) Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems project, turnover time in 3 California hospitals dropped by an average of 9 minutes, or 21%.…
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