Caresyntax Made it Simple to Run the OR Efficiently Hospital’s Block Schedule

Challenges

New leadership in perioperative services at a large, for-profit hospital recognized that they had the ability to capture needed data to drive transformational change and improve operational and financial outcomes. What was missing however, were tools to support sustainable improvement.

• Perioperative leaders knew there was room for reduced variability and improved efficiency, especially when it came to block utilization, but did not have the resources to do a full analysis.
• Administration realized the data was not clean, and the organization had no confidence in its validity. Additionally, the hospital did not want to dedicate FTEs to clean and validate the data on a regular basis.
• Surgical services leaders knew they needed to focus on growth but were struggling on how to free up time that was typically spent juggling inefficient and wasteful block schedules. Leadership approached Caresyntax to undertake a complete review of block utilization and allocation in an initial three-month analysis.

Solutions

Caresyntax’s initial opportunity assessment found the hospital’s block schedule contained 209 blocks with 95 different block holders. Of these blocks:

• 24 had no utilization
• 95 had less than 40% utilization in the prior three months.

Caresyntax produced an in-depth report on every block and provided the data and visualizations perioperative leadership needed to overhaul their block schedule. The highly visual and comprehensive 240-page report presented to perioperative management and block committee empowered them to realize the following benefits in just six months:

• 25% increase in case volume minutes
• 39% average increase in block utilization

Perioperative leadership began using Caresyntax block analysis in regular block committee meetings to make changes, communicate to surgeons and clean up low utilization blocks. The organization continues to use Caresyntax’s analytics solutions to reduce unnecessary surgical variability.

How We Helped

• Through Caresyntax’s analytics solutions, we enabled the organization to identify and reduce unnecessary surgical variability and improve operational and financial outcomes.
• Relieved the organization from manual and time-consuming calculation of block utilization and allocation.
• Enabled the transition to Caresyntax’s block analysis in regular block committee meetings to make changes and communicate to surgeons.
• Optimization became a catalyst for culture change and governance best practice, with heightened accountability and successful collaboration among health care specialties.