Health System Adoption of LeanTaaS’ Solutions Accelerate as Company Looks to Create an AI-Enabled Air Traffic Control for Inpatient and Ambulatory Capacity Management
June 8, 2022 — LeanTaaS, Inc., a leading Silicon Valley-based technology innovator that transforms core processes to improve patient access and operational performance, today announced new enhancements to its iQueue products for operating rooms, infusion centers, and inpatient beds. The announcement was made at LeanTaaS’ third hospital operations virtual summit, Transform, hosted in partnership with Becker’s Healthcare. This news comes on the heels of LeanTaaS’ recent announcements of earning a 96.5 (out of 100) satisfaction score for its OR product by KLAS Research and a significant growth investment by Bain Capital Private Equity. LeanTaaS’s momentum also includes growing 40% year over year in the last two years despite COVID-19-induced pressures on hospital spending. This impressive growth is fueled by rising patient volumes and an increasing demand from health systems for analytics-driven, AI-based solutions that improve how health systems use expensive, constrained resources to increase patient access to medical care and realize increased revenue. On average, LeanTaaS’ customers see an impact of $500,000 per year per OR, $20,000 per year per infusion chair, and $9,000 per year per inpatient bed.
With innovation and customer feedback at the forefront, LeanTaaS is releasing new enhancements to help providers manage critical resources smoothly, efficiently, and according to cutting-edge lean principles. Product enhancements include:
- New iQueue for Operating Rooms Features:
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- Staffing support through “Future Volume Predictions”: LeanTaaS has launched a new feature that allows a nurse manager or an anesthesia staff leader to peek into future case volume as far as four weeks out. With the nationwide nursing and anesthesia workforce shortage, every OR must prioritize matching the right staff resources with demand. Waiting until the last minute to make staff changes leads to decreased staff satisfaction, decreased OR productivity, and even cancellations or rescheduled surgeries. The new tool from iQueue for OR takes current bookings, block schedules, physician’s booking and cancellation patterns, and additional factors like holidays and breaks into account to provide future volume predictions.
- Predicting unfilled blocks to increase access to OR time: iQueue for Operating Rooms features a new tool allowing OR schedulers to predict with 99% confidence how many blocks are likely to be unfilled, up to 21 days in advance. It provides early access to auto-release time, which is valuable because OR time that is released sooner is filled at a much higher rate. According to LeanTaaS customers, OR time released at 21 days is filled at 40-50% and time released at 5 days is filled at just 12%. This feature, which utilizes a highly reliable machine learning model, can predict with 99% accuracy the number of blocks that will go unfilled and a list of block owners least likely to fill their blocks, without relying on surgeons to release that time early. These predictive insights allow staff to book extra cases or to close rooms in advance if there are staffing and capacity constraints. “We see our average time frame for proactivity release is hovering at about 19 days. This is almost 3 weeks in advance of our blocks being auto-released … this helps us to backfill that open time that may otherwise go unfilled,” said Tim Menditto, Business Manager, UCHealth
- Automation through “In App Messaging”: This feature is intended to eliminate phone calls and faxes in the OR scheduling process. ORs and clinics waste 20% of their time using a combination of email, phone, fax, and messenger services to coordinate around a case. iQueue for OR solves this problem by building a robust and HIPAA compliant digital workflow for case communication. Significantly, all of the messages in iQueue will be permanently attached to each single surgical case so that months or years down the line these messages can be accessed for review.
- New iQueue for Infusion Centers Feature:
- Optimizing nursing resource utilization through“Nurse Pull”: This new capability combines process optimization of clinical operations with advanced algorithms to help infusion centers transition from a “push” method of assigning nurses to a pull method. This is especially critical as infusion centers across the country are desperately trying to determine how to best optimize their available nursing capacity and retain nurses while facing a historic nursing shortage and nurse burnout. This feature is planned for general availability by year-end. “We implemented this method in early January and our nurses actually love it! Our drug wait times have dropped 15 minutes and nurses are getting out early,” said Lisa Rioux, RN, BSN, OCN, CRNI Nurse Manager from Novant Health.
- New iQueue for Inpatient Beds Feature:
- Improved LOS through accurate “Patient Level Discharge Predictions’: This feature improves the accuracy of the likelihood of discharges patient by patient and unit by unit in an acute inpatient setting. This enables nursing leaders and frontline staff to make data-driven throughput decisions. iQueue achieved a 95% accuracy rate for patient level discharge predictions in recent customer evaluations. This level of accuracy increases decision-making confidence, ensuring patients will be discharged on time and able to go home sooner, while also providing open beds to patients who need to be admitted, thus significantly reducing boarding and diversions. “Frontline clinical teams need tools that provide situational awareness and drive standard work to decrease the cognitive load and chaos they navigate day-to-day. iQueue for Inpatient Beds checks all of these boxes. It has been an instrumental tool to facilitate smooth patient flow and hardwire daily operations across UCHealth,” said Jamie Nordhagen, MS, RN, NEA-BC, Senior Director of Patient Flow and Capacity Management from UCHealth.
“This is a critical time in healthcare and I believe we’ve developed disruptive products to help address capacity challenges that both providers and patients face, like delayed access to appointments, long wait times, and staff shortages,” said Sanjeev Agrawal, President and COO of LeanTaaS. “We’re excited to enhance our current suite of products so that we can continue to help our customers achieve exceptional ROI as well as an improved provider and patient experience. We’re also keeping a very close eye on future product innovations because our long term vision is to build a broader healthcare optimization platform across the continuum of care.”
LeanTaaS’s AI and ML based solutions have now been deployed in more than 500 leading hospitals and 130 health systems across the U.S., including 12 of the top 20 health systems in the country. These hospitals use LeanTaaS’s iQueue platform to optimize capacity utilization in infusion centers, operating rooms, and inpatient beds. iQueue for Operating Rooms is used by more than 2,500 ORs across 47 health systems to improve surgical capacity utilization, attract new surgical volume, and improve the patient experience. iQueue for Infusion Centers is used by nearly 500 infusion centers, with over 10,000 chairs across 105 health systems with a customer base that includes over 80% of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network and nearly 60% of National Cancer Institute-Designated Cancer Centers. iQueue for Inpatient Beds, launched in 2021, is scaling rapidly at a fast pace with several marquee customers using the product across multiple locations.
LeanTaaS recently received a 96.5 (out of 100) score from KLAS Research for overall satisfaction for iQueue for Operating Rooms. This is one of the highest-rated products that KLAS has ever measured, with the average score for KLAS-rated software products being 80.9 (across nearly 400 software products). LeanTaaS’s long-term vision is to be the AI-enabled “air traffic control” that optimizes patient flow and capacity across the continuum of care. This looks like launching new products to become the platform of choice for all health systems to unlock scarce capacity across the patient’s lifetime healthcare journey – from inpatient care to outpatient care to home health. The recent investment by Bain Capital will enable LeanTaaS to accelerate these plans.
For up-to-date information on the latest Transform activities, follow LeanTaaS on Twitter and like us on LinkedIn and Facebook for ongoing conference updates. Official event hashtags include #LeanTaaSTransform
About LeanTaaS
LeanTaaS provides software solutions that combine lean principles, predictive and prescriptive analytics, and machine learning to transform hospital and infusion center operations. The company’s software is being used by over 130 health systems across the nation, which all rely on the iQueue cloud-based solutions to increase patient access, decrease wait times, reduce healthcare delivery costs, and improve revenue. LeanTaaS is based in Santa Clara, California, and Charlotte, North Carolina. For more information about LeanTaaS, please visit https://leantaas.com/, and connect on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
LeanTaaS Media Contact
Kate Soden