Introduction
This statement by Peter Drucker emphasizes the importance of accurate data in managing and improving any organizational function.
The operating room in a hospital is the highest cost site of service. Due to the reproducibility of surgical case flow, hospital management is afforded an incredible opportunity to improve efficiency and lower cost by apply technologies that provide accurate real-time measurement of performance.
Surgical case flow can be broken down into distinct measurable intervals, each with their own expectation for performance. First case of the day requires a defined time for Pre-op nursing to be ready, for anesthesia to sign-in and for surgeon to sign-in. Following these three metrics, the remainder of the first case and all subsequent cases require just 5 intervals to be documented in order to provide valuable data enhancing the efficiency for every case. These subsequent intervals include:
The vast majority of hospitals do not currently enjoy a means to easily communicate expectations and measure performance on these reproducible intervals. A Surgical Services area with 8 Operating rooms and an average of 5 cases per room requires management to communicate expectations and measure performance for 216 distinct intervals. Performing this manually, this is not possible.
In this paper we provide a case study demonstrating how application of the process of effective communication of expectations and measurement of performance led to remarkable improvements in physician and staff satisfaction and dramatic improvement in hospital economics. In this we demonstrate one such digital technology that serves to easily perform the communication and measurement functions and provide a wide array of analytic tools to communicate and reward performance.