Perioperative process assessment

The challenge

A mid-size regional health system was experiencing operating room inefficiencies, especially at their flagship hospital. While everyone understood that there was a problem, root causes of same-day cancellations and delayed first-case starts were not clear. The health system wanted to create better patient, surgeon, and staff experiences while also improving financial health.

Our approach

First, our team partnered with perioperative leadership to conduct a qualitative and quantitative assessment of perioperative operations; defined as ‘decision for surgery’ through ‘PACU recovery.’ This included:

• Comprehensive data analysis across three different technology systems
• Direct observations with OR scheduling, pre-anesthesia testing, registration, pre-operative preparation, Post-Anesthesia Care Unit (PACU), and within the OR
• Interviews with surgeons, nurses, schedulers, registrars, and other key stakeholders in the perioperative lifecycle

Once we had the data, the Vynamic team identified a series of near-term improvements (to be implemented in the existing environment) and sustainable solutions (requiring process redesign) to both improve the comprehensive perioperative experience and stem financial loss.

These four critical factors ensured successful program execution:

Get to the why

Understanding why a current state process is designed a certain way, versus just focusing on the inefficiency, is critical to designing a future state that meets everyone’s needs.

Break down silos

Treating the perioperative process as a holistic journey and bringing together cross-functional team members (not just leadership) was critical to identifying solutions that would work.

Data and people

Both quantitative and qualitative information are important, but it’s just as important to crosswalk information from one to another; revealing a richer, multi-dimensional story.

Work with what you have

The client was set to implement a new Electronic Medical Record (EMR) in 2 years, but needed to improve perioperative operations now by finding new ways to leverage existing tools we could make an immediate impact.

The results

A $1.2M opportunity was identified if the flagship hospital could reduce same-day cancellations. The health system immediately implemented several near-term improvements to avoid same-day cancellations. For sustainable solutions requiring major process redesign, successful pilots were launched and the client plans to scale those initiatives.