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Transform Webinar

How Providence Used AI-Enhanced Workflows to Capture 6k Cases in Incremental Surgical Volume and Improve Block Utilization by Nearly 5%

Speakers

Copy of Kevin Streeter Headshot
Kevin Streeter MBA, MS, RN, FACHE
System Executive Director of Clinical Operations Providence Health System

Summary

Providence Health, like many healthcare systems, faced significant challenges in optimizing operating room (OR) efficiency, often constrained by outdated block management practices, limited real-time visibility into OR availability, and artificially restricted capacity due to mismanaged block time. These inefficiencies limited Providence’s ability to maximize OR utilization, impacting patient access and delaying care.

Kevin Streeter, Executive Director of Operations at Providence, will share how the organization implemented data-driven strategies and AI-powered technology to transform its OR management practices. By improving key processes, Providence reduced abandoned block time by 30%, increased block utilization by 5%, and extended proactive block release times to an average of 28 days. These enhancements enabled Providence to serve over 6,000 incremental patients in just 10 months, significantly reducing surgeons’ backlog of cases—in some instances, by as much as 50%—and ensuring patients received care earlier. This initiative not only enhanced patient access but also contributed to financial margin growth, providing additional resources to further invest in the organization’s mission and community health programs.

Learn how the Providence team established governance structures, navigated system-wide change management, and collaborated with their technology provider to deploy an AI-powered solution across 422 operating rooms in six states within nine months.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Understand how Providence identified and addressed inefficiencies in OR block management to increase utilization and improve outcomes.
  2. Learn how Providence leveraged a third-party platform to fill open OR time and boost surgical volumes.
  3. Explore how releasing unused OR time earlier helped Providence schedule more surgeries and drive financial growth.
  4. Learn about the specific AI and ML capabilities that allow for better decision making.
  5. Gain insights into Providence’s OR management approach and how it can be applied to other health systems to improve efficiency and patient care.

Related resources

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Chapter 1: The Looming Challenge

If you work in the healthcare industry, or even if you’re just an interested observer, you don’t need a book to tell you that the financial pressure is on as never before. A perfect storm of circumstances is swirling together, one that will make survivability, not to mention profitability, a greater challenge for healthcare companies than we’ve seen in the modern era.

As with banks, retailers, and airlines, which had to rapidly enhance their brick-and-mortar footprints with robust online business models—it is the early movers eager to gain new efficiencies that will thrive and gain market share. The slow-to-move and the inefficient will end up being consolidated into larger health systems seeking to expand their geographical footprints.

The pressures on healthcare

Let’s look at just a few of the looming challenges healthcare must meet head-on.

An aging population

By the year 2030, the number of adults sixty-five years of age or older will exceed the number of children eighteen years or younger in the United States. We are living longer than our parents did. Positive news for sure, but problematic for several reasons.

The older we get, the more medical help we need. Older people have more chronic diseases. By 2025, nearly 50 percent of the population will suffer from one or more chronic diseases that will require ongoing medical intervention. This combination of an aging population and an increase in chronic diseases will create a ballooning demand for healthcare services.

Read more