Saint Thomas Health

Challenges

Hospital leadership was prepared to add additional ORs to meet demand but at significant cost to the hospital. With streamlining costs as a top priority and reimbursement slated for decline, Saint Thomas engaged Caresyntax to pinpoint specific areas of improvement.

Solutions

Caresyntax enabled Saint Thomas Hospital to base allocation decisions on clear comprehensive data and free up additional time to perform more cases. Rather than add additional rooms, Saint Thomas was able to cut block rooms from 15 to 11, shut down one room, and add volume in 2 rooms. Saint Thomas was able to customize Caresyntax analytics to fit their local approach and ultimately identify and resolve their issue of delayed case starts. During the test period alone, the changes incurred through Caresyntax were observed to enhance surgeon satisfaction and to promote a collaborative work culture.

How We Helped

• Identified surgeons who may run ORs concurrently but had low actual overlapping cases using our patented concurrency measure
• Based staffing ratios on empirical evidence rather than the status quo, considering peak times and low-demand times by the day and week.
• Visually detected underutilized and overstaffed ORs, analyzing frequency and length of “white space” time period during the day.
• Streamlined scheduling to increase number of surgeries performed while decreasing costs associated with after-hours cases and inefficient staffing.