354 hospitals across 85 health systems – totaling more than 4,100 ORs – rely on iQueue for Operating Rooms to maximize OR access by optimizing Block and Open Time. This includes 4 of the country’s 10 largest health systems and over 13 of the top 20 hospitals per U.S. News & World Report.
THE CHALLENGE
OR time is extremely valuable and maximizing OR utilization is really hard. For successful surgical block utilization, perioperative leaders need to have direct access to transparent data, defensible metrics, visualizations, and easy-to-use tools “on the fly”. iQueue creates a credible, fair and transparent system for managing Block and Open time while maximizing staff, equipment and capital utilization. The results: $500K per OR per year improvement in revenue. Higher surgeon, patient and staff satisfaction. Increased primetime utilization. Growth of surgical market share.
Improve OR access & grow market share
Scheduling cases outside of a block often requires multiple back-and-forth phone calls between OR schedulers and surgeons’ offices. Despite time-consuming efforts to fill the time, OR time is underutilized, every day.
iQueue for Operating Rooms combines machine learning with smart cloud-based tools that not only create open time but that also drive OR utilization and performance.
Right-size blocks with unbiased metrics
Block allocation and block schedules have historically been influenced by politics and seniority. The fundamental problem with the Block Utilization metric itself is inherently flawed: the metric is ambiguous and does not accurately reflect surgeon practice patterns.
iQueue for Operating Rooms removes the politics and ambiguity by highlighting truly repurposable portions of time repeatedly abandoned, released, or left unused (i.e. “Collectable Time”) by block owners that can be taken away without impacting the surgeon’s practice.
Improve visibility into operational performance
Surgeons and perioperative leaders frequently lack a single source of truth and access to actionable data they can trust. OR performance reporting often takes weeks to compile and weeks, months or even quarters to act upon.
iQueue for Operating Rooms provides easy access to real-time data with rich drill downs, clear visualizations and prescriptive analytics. As a result, the leadership is more confident, surgeons are more engaged, and the organization is able to have more objective conversations around performance metrics.
Automate and simplify manual processes
Scheduling cases is a manual process, prone to inaccuracies. Case and patient information transmitted via phone and fax requires interpretation, manual data entry, and multiple phone calls. Furthermore, surgeon offices aren’t always aware that they should release block time they are not going to use.
iQueue for Operating Rooms digitizes the workflow, streamlines the scheduling process and improves accuracy. The digital process leads to fewer delays and higher levels of patient, surgeon, clinic and staff satisfaction.
Build agility and resilience
As health systems navigate volatile market conditions such as unexpected “demand and supply shocks” from COVID-19, the need to abruptly open or close rooms and/or to change block and/or staffing needs becomes increasingly important.
Building agility and resilience requires adoption of scalable tools for flexing resources, viewing and managing backlogs, and prioritizing cases. iQueue’s Admin Console provides a central command capability to instantly adjust and respond to changing conditions.
“iQueue is a far more scientific way of managing OR capacity and creating access to OR time, accountability for block time, and transparency into operating metrics. The changes to our core processes for release and request, block rightsizing, and transparency into the metrics is exactly what we needed. This is the future of OR capacity management.”
Dio Sumagaysay
Associate Chief Nursing Officer
Perioperative Services & Multispecialty Procedure Units
Oregon Health & Science University
“We are excited to utilize iQueue for our operating rooms because it gives us access to data that we previously did not have. iQueue enables us to have a better understanding of our true capacity and where we have opportunities to optimize our operating room utilization.”
Leslie Barrett
President and Chief Operating Officer
Novant Health Medical Park Hospital
“The tools streamlined surgeons’ and their offices’ abilities to find open time and how open time was advertised, and made it very easy for surgeons to proactively release any block time that might not be needed far enough in advance to where it can be efficiently filled by another surgeon. This has not only helped our existing surgeons eliminate their case backlogs, but also has provided ease of access to open time for surgeons who were looking to bring new or more cases to MultiCare.”
Michael Myer, MD, MBA
Cardiothoracic Surgeon and Physician Executive
MultiCare
