How St. Mary’s Medical Center Rebalanced Infusion Scheduling and Increased Nurse Productivity with iQueue in 7 Weeks

Speakers

Kevin Dryanski, MBA
Kevin Dryanski, MBA
Director, Oncology Service Line & Laboratory & Blood Bank SCL Health St. Mary's Medical Center
Autumn Clark, BSN, RN, OCN
Autumn Clark, BSN, RN, OCN
Clinical Nurse Manager Cancer Center and Infusion Services, SCL Health St. Mary's Medical Center
Vanessa Sprang, BSN, RN
Vanessa Sprang, BSN, RN
Clinical Nurse Manager & Business Manager Cancer Center and Infusion Services, SCL Health St. Mary's Medical Center

Summary

St. Mary’s Medical Center has delivered comprehensive care to patients in western Colorado and eastern Utah for over a century, and St. Mary’s Cancer Center maintains an especially high standard of care. Infusion scheduling and capacity challenges, however, were consistently disrupting the quality experience that St. Mary Medical Center strove to provide to both patients and nurses.  

The center grappled with unbalanced and inefficient infusion scheduling, uneven chair utilization that led to untapped capacity they could not easily access, and a pressing need for more physical space to accommodate patient demand. If they could not find operational solutions to unlock further capacity in the infusion space they already had, then St. Mary’s Medical Center would need to request a $4-5 million dollar expansion of the space. 

Join three infusion leaders from St. Mary’s Medical Center as they discuss finding and deploying a technology solution to help meet their operational goals, which could be implemented in a matter of weeks without placing a drain on existing IT resources. When they adopted LeanTaaS’ AI-powered iQueue for Infusion Centers technology, the center worked closely with the LeanTaaS team to rapidly implement the solution and bring it to full functionality. In doing so St. Mary’s Medical Center swiftly addressed their scheduling and capacity pain points, yielding results in just seven weeks and delaying the clinic’s costly planned physical expansion. 

Viewers of this webinar will be able to: 

  • Identify the common root causes of capacity bottlenecks in infusion centers 
  • Explain how these causes can be addressed with the application of advanced analytics, to open further capacity
  • Describe how to implement a light-lift IT solution for the swiftest results

Results

8%Patient volume growth without adding resources or creating unsafe nurse-to-patient ratios
1.3Additional appointments per nurse
5Minute patient wait times
We as a team can’t say enough about our partnership with LeanTaaS and the support we’ve gotten from them...They listened very closely to what our needs were, then on the technical side… LeanTaaS helped us bridge that communication gap…when we were working on the back end of our EMR, those teams understood each other.”
Vanessa Sprang, BSN, RN
Clinical Nurse Manager & Business Manager, Cancer Center and Infusion Services, SCL Health St. Mary’s Medical Center

Related resources

Ready to get started?

Take the first step towards unlocking capacity, generating ROI, and increasing patient access.

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.