The Optimized OR

Welcome to the Optimized OR.

We are so happy you are here. LeanTaaS in partnership with OR Manager is pleased to offer perioperative professionals a dynamic platform where you can gain timely access to information regarding proven processes, current policies, and innovative technologies that are challenging how things have always been done. Why? Because there are better, easier, and more efficient ways to gain OR efficiency. We call it the Optimized OR.

So, stay connected! Bookmark this site.

We want to be sharing your story here, next! Join your peers who have grown their case volume by 6%, on average; increased their staffed room utilization by 7% on average, and gained an additional $500k in revenue per OR per year.

on demand webinar

OR’s Juggling Act: Matching Supply of Anesthesia Coverage with Surgeon Demand for OR Time

Date

Wednesday May 25, 2021

Time

12:00 PM ET

How can today’s OR managers and leaders ensure surgeons have optimal access and ORs have the right staff and anesthesia coverage, while simultaneously balancing that with staffing shortages, anesthesia shortages, increasing case volume and declining reimbursement? Learn how to solve these challenges by increasing efficiency, improving block allocation and gaining better visibility in currently underutilized blocks and staffed rooms.

Featured Content

Webinars & Interviews

Articles

Podcasts

About iQueue

Webinars & Interviews

Articles

Podcasts

About iQueue

Unlocking Healthcare Capacity and Access with Technology and Lean Transformation

EBOOK

Unlocking Healthcare
Capacity and Access with
Technology and Lean
Transformation

To efficiently manage critical resources according to cutting edge lean principles, the healthcare industry must leverage artificial intelligence, as well as predictive and prescriptive analytics.

These tools are the key to transforming processes and creating significant, lasting improvements in patient outcomes.

Read this eBook to learn more about...

Perspectives on optimizing asset utilization in healthcare
Why healthcare needs to focus on capacity management, and existing tools like EHRs are not enough
How to achieve perioperative ‘systemness’: Learn how CommonSpirit aligned people, process and technology across its ecosystem
Hospital operations and asset utilization discussions around OR capacity management, inpatient beds capacity management and infusion center management

Learn More

Building the Foundation for Sophisticated Capacity Management in Hospitals

EBOOK

Building the Foundation for Sophisticated Capacity Management in Hospitals

Learn more about...

Why current methods of allocating and managing capacity are simply inadequate to meet the growing complexity of the challenge
What mathematical concepts underlie successful capacity management, and what healthcare can learn from the industries who have unlocked them
How health systems are using tools to solve their mathematical challenges, and achieving stunning improvements in their capacity

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Solving Common Yet Complex OR Scheduling Challenges

EBOOK

Solving Common Yet Complex OR Scheduling Challenges

When it comes to OR scheduling, don't rely on manual methods such as phone calls and faxes— there are now better opportunities to optimize scheduling and improve visibility into the historically opaque OR schedule.

In this eBook, learn to streamline your OR scheduling process to fill open time and explore how to address the following challenges:

Block time left unfilled
Missed Connections Between Clinics and OR Facilities
Surgeons’ block times often based on personal preferences, seniority, or status

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Cornerstones of a better system

EBOOK

Cornerstones of a Better System: 7 Steps to Improve OR Financial and Operational Performance

One of the biggest challenges OR managers and VPs of surgery face is the efficient use of OR time. They struggle to balance revenue and utilization targets with surgeon and staff preferences against a backdrop of often unpredictable supply and demand. The way in which blocks of OR time are allocated, taken away, and released into open time leaves a great deal of room for optimization.

This eBook, includes real examples from SUNY Upstate Medical University, Novant Health, and Dignity Health on how they have successfully:

Built the foundational elements of a better scheduling system.
Evaluate block usage time in a more meaningful way.
Utilize transparent, real-time data in scheduling and reports to stakeholders.

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OR's Juggling Act: Matching Supply of Anesthesia Coverage with Surgeon Demand for OR Time

ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

OR's Juggling Act: Matching Supply of Anesthesia Coverage with Surgeon Demand for OR Time

Access on-demand webinar

After this on-demand webinar, attendees will know how to:

The challenges faced in matching OR supply and demand
Efficiency gained by evaluating primetime, staffed room and block utilization
How to effectively leverage data to right-size the OR
How new technologies are facilitating the matching of OR supply & demand

OR's Juggling Act: Matching Supply of Anesthesia Coverage with Surgeon Demand for OR Time

How to Conduct an Effective Block Meeting

ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

How to Conduct an Effective Block Meeting

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Picture this: You’re participating in an OR Block Committee meeting and everyone has a different opinion of the data, and no one agrees on what’s right. Sound familiar?

Yichen Yang, Arvind Tyagarajan, and Sandip Srinivas, iQueue for Operating Rooms Product Managers, will share how the most innovative and forward-looking hospitals and health systems are now conducting OR Block Committee meetings by leveraging objective data captured by the latest web and mobile technologies. Using this approach, your block committee meetings will be more productive, committee members will trust the data more, and surgeons will better understand the “WHY” behind their block allocation.

After this on-demand webinar, attendees will know how to:

Run an effective block committee meeting without spending hours preparing reports beforehand
Use automated tools to facilitate block discussions with key stakeholders
Support block decisions with objective, defensible, surgeon-centric data

How to Conduct an Effective Block Meeting

Why Block Time is Still Not the Answer

ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

Why Block Time is Still Not the Answer

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At any given hospital, upwards of 80 percent of the time in the OR can be locked into long-term block ownership. If an institution wants to ensure that its block allocation is well-balanced, right-sized, and up-to-date, they need access to powerful corrective mechanisms. Most institutions today, however, rely on block utilization as the sole metric for making corrective allocation decisions.

But block utilization is a demonstrably poor metric to drive these decisions, and we can tell you why!

iQueue for Operating Rooms provides an enhanced solution with its proprietary Collectable Time methodology, through our newly-revamped Collect module. Collect helps hospital administrators unlock operating room capacity by giving them an easy way to discover block time that has been over-allocated to individual, group, or service-level block owners, and empowers them with data-driven evidence to make defensible decisions in taking this block time away from those underperforming block owners.

In this on-demand webinar discover:

The flaws in using block allocation as the sole metric for right-sizing block and the iQueue alternative, collectable time
The capabilities of the newly-designed Collect module and the ways in which it promotes decision making and collaboration
Recommendations and best practices to implement a dynamic block right-sizing framework at your institution
How major healthcare institutions have eliminated ineffective block committee meetings.

Leadership, Policy & Transparency

ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

Leadership, Policy & Transparency

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Managing operating rooms is hard, especially without access to reliable and readily available data. EHRs, built to capture information about patients and their care, do not provide the required level of data visibility or reliability needed to make daily, let alone strategic decisions about expensive healthcare assets such as operating rooms.

Ensuring surgeons have optimal access, knowing exactly where and how to drive efficiency, and delivering value to surgeons, patients, and staff is a constant challenge. A challenge that requires greater visibility into available operating room time and key performance indicators.

Please join us as WakeMed Health and Hospital’s Business Manager, Surgical Services will explain how his three-hospital health system has:

Transitioned from manually compiling reports (EHR reports were inadequate);
Established effective policies to drive value and efficiency;
Created capacity in their busy operating rooms, providing greater access to open time; and
Delivered transparency that has changed surgeon practices.

Lean and Patient Safety: The Perfect Perioperative Partners

ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

Lean and Patient Safety: The Perfect Perioperative Partners

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Unprecedented times present unique opportunities. We all know how the pandemic has disrupted perioperative and elective services. The pandemic is challenging us, but it has also presented us with an opportunity to evaluate many processes during the re-start of surgical service lines. As you re-deploy you will find many opportunities for improvement. You have the ability with the right approach to improve quality, staff and surgeon satisfaction, patient satisfaction, flow, and expense.

How do you take advantage of this moment in time to identify the challenges that have plagued your OR for years, create logical plans, and finally implement solutions that work? During this free webinar, we will share Lean tools and methodologies that can help you attain a future state that is better than the pre-pandemic normal. You will learn straightforward Lean practices, tips, and tools that can help you improve perioperative services for the benefit of all. Discussion will also include case study examples of how Lean thinking can work to improve the effectiveness of your OR, every day, for everyone.

Lean and Patient Safety: The Perfect Perioperative Partners

Restoring Your Elective Surgery Caseload Post-COVID

ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

Restoring Your Elective Surgery Caseload Post-COVID

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Amid the coronavirus outbreak, most hospitals are cancelling or postponing elective surgeries. Addressing the large backlog to restore elective surgery caseload is a top post-pandemic priority of OR leaders. This will require careful planning and execution in the coming weeks and months to identify the backlog, manage block versus open time, open more time to perform more cases, and accommodate the pent-up volume given each hospital’s available resources (rooms, staffing, locations).

In this webinar, industry experts share a set of tools and a step-by-step approach as part of a model for successfully managing and restoring elective surgery caseload.

Restoring Your Elective Surgery Caseload Post-COVID

How Novant Health Optimized OR Capacity to Restore Elective Surgery & Achieve Stronger Financial Health

ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

How Novant Health Optimized OR Capacity to Restore Elective Surgery & Achieve Stronger Financial Health

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Novant Health, with 15 community hospitals in the southeast, has recovered remarkably well from COVID-19 and its impact on elective surgeries. During the six month period from June - Dec 2020, Novant Health system performed 2.3% MORE surgical cases and used 3.7% more OR minutes than in the same period the prior year by leveraging predictive and prescriptive analytics in the cloud.

In this session Dr. John Mann, President & COO at Novant Health Clemmons Medical Center and Sanjeev Agrawal, President & COO of LeanTaaS will share the journey of how they did it through COVID period and the path ahead.

How Novant Health Optimized OR Capacity to Restore Elective Surgery & Achieve Stronger Financial Health

Why Turnovers and Delays Are Not Your Most Important Metrics

ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

Why Turnovers and Delays Are Not Your Most Important Metrics

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While turnovers and delays are good indicators of efficiency and certainly important metrics for surgeon, patient, and staff satisfaction, they are not the operating room’s most important metrics. In order to drive optimal perioperative performance, leadership needs easy access to current, actionable, and reliable operating room utilization metrics.

Join Brooks DuBose from LeanTaaS’ iQueue for Operating Rooms implementation team as he explains where the opportunities lie and how to drill down in order to come up with actionable steps and strategies for meaningful performance improvement.

Why Turnovers and Delays Are Not Your Most Important Metrics

Optimizing Prime Time Utilization

ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

Optimizing Prime Time Utilization

Access on-demand webinar

Getting the most out of your operating rooms (OR) during prime time hours is no easy task. Surgeons and clinics struggle to find available time to book cases, while at the same time large blocks of scheduled OR time go unused during the day. Without the ability to access the OR during the day, surgeons resort to adding on cases after business hours or seeking other facilities to accommodate their needs. This results in empty ORs, underutilized capacity, dissatisfied surgeons, lost revenue, and high overtime costs.

While low block utilization, inefficient turnovers and/or staffing challenges are often viewed as major root causes of poor prime time OR utilization, the root causes of optimal utilization include a systemic lack of accessibility into OR time; low to no accountability for how blocks are managed; and poor visibility into key operational metrics.

After this on-demand webinar, attendees will know how to:

Uncover the true drivers of poor OR utilization
Create and communicate easy access to OR time during prime time hours
Use credible, real-time data to manage capacity and measure performance

OR's Juggling Act: Matching Supply of Anesthesia Coverage with Surgeon Demand for OR Time

How to Conduct an Effective Block Meeting

Why Block Time is Still Not the Answer

Leadership, Policy & Transparency

Lean and Patient Safety: The Perfect Perioperative Partners

Restoring Your Elective Surgery Caseload Post-COVID

How Novant Health Optimized OR Capacity to Restore Elective Surgery & Achieve Stronger Financial Health

Why Turnovers and Delays Are Not Your Most Important Metrics

Optimizing Prime Time Utilization

All Articles

How Can We Use the Metrics Typically Reported in Benchmarks?

Joint Commission Conducting Both Virtual and Onsite Surveys in 2021

Different Timetables, Similar Challenges Seen in Elective Surgical Caseloads

Defining ‘Wants’ vs. ‘Needs’ Drives Success of Instrument Standardization

Don’t Fall Victim to Data
Breaches

Nuts and Bolts of New Technology Acquisition – Pt 1

Nuts and Bolts of New Technology Acquisition – Pt 2

Well-Crafted Handoff Tools Save Valuable Time in OR Schedule

Reinvent and Reap the Rewards of Improved Handoffs – Pt 1

Reinvent and Reap the Rewards of Improved Handoffs – Pt 2

Supply Chain Strategies Shift to Meet Pandemic-Induced Demands

Bridging the Gap

Action Needed now to Meet Future Demand for Nurses

Capture the Right Case Data to Maximize OR Utilization

Hospital — Surgeon Data Transparency Delivers…

Achieving Systemness in Perioperative Care

Making the Invisible Visible…

Triaging OR Capacity Amid a Crisis: Lessons Learned from the Field

Join our new digital community of operating room professionals using the popular work messaging app, Slack.

This new collaborative platform gives you the opportunity to connect and network with and to seek advice from peers, all across the country. Not familiar with Slack? That’s ok! We have a tutorial just for you. Please join us!