As a perioperative business manager for over a decade, I’ve seen dozens of approaches and projects to improve operating room efficiency. No matter how you calculate your operating room utilization, if it’s less than 80% there’s room for improvement. Even if you’re happy with your utilization as a metric, you know you have several problems:… Read More
Excellent service processes are fast processes — this is the universal truth of service operations. Just as the water level in the bay hides the rocks from visibility, high levels of inventory mask underlying problems in manufacturing or logistics. Extending the analogy to service, long process times mask all kinds of service inefficiencies, such as… Read More
It seems as if news about another hospital laying off workers–or worse, closing–hits the news everyday; at last count 21 hospitals stopped treating patients in 2016. Hospitals and healthcare systems across the country, including some of the largest, laid off thousands of employees. In November 2016 alone, 13 providers eliminated more than 1,000 jobs. In September,… Read More
While reimbursement requirements are a major driver of this focus, reducing LOS can also decrease the number of hospital-acquired conditions (HACs), which are subject to payment reductions of their own. Efforts to reduce LOS have led to a flurry of research into factors that impact LOS and how to address them. Due to the diversity… Read More
Hat tip to Sharon O’Keefe, CEO of the University of Chicago Medical Center, for introducing the phrase “make your assets sweat” to our team, which inspired me to write this article. The Affordable Care Act, increased government regulations and rising healthcare costs are forcing hospitals to do more with less. Last year, several major healthcare networks… Read More
It would be an understatement to say that 2016 was a year of unanticipated results. I expect 2017 will be another fascinating year for providers, patients, suppliers and payers. As president and CMO of LeanTaaS, I expect to have a front-row seat in partnership with the 30+ leading health systems we work with all over… Read More
A common challenge with healthcare in general, and cancer care in particular, is the peaks and valleys in patient appointment scheduling, which often results in inefficient use of scarce and expensive resources, unpredictable wait times for patients and overtime hours for staff. Sanjeev Argawal, president and CMO of LeanTaaS Healthcare explains how data-science can optimize… Read More
Interoperability continues to be one of healthcare IT’s biggest trends in 2016 as the industry sees momentous forward movement. In fact, interoperability is not a new trend. It has been an important mission (and a challenge) for healthcare administrators for decades, but the past couple of years have been game-changing. First, the U.S. Department of… Read More
Most large, complex health systems rely on block schedules for managing the complexity of operating room utilization. The concept has a visceral appeal to it — give the surgeon or the service line a full-day or a half-day block, and leave the scheduling of procedures within the block to the block owner since they are… Read More
Dick Foster is a Partner at Lux Capital and a member of our Board. Becker’s interviewed him to get his thoughts on healthcare trends and the “hospital of the future”. NOTE: This is the second segment in Becker’s two-part interview with Dr. Dick Foster. In Part I of this interview, they covered the latest technology trends and challenges… Read More