iQueue for Operating Rooms Case Study – Baptist South

Baptist Health is a nonprofit, mission-driven healthcare system in the greater Jacksonville, Florida area. The system includes 5 Magnet-designated hospitals with 74 operating rooms and 14 endoscopy suites. Opened in 2005, Baptist Health Medical Center South includes 11 ORs and is consistently recognized both regionally and nationally for providing high-quality patient care.

When trying to increase access to Baptist South’s ORs, surgical services leadership faced several challenges:

The block schedule had limited open (first come, first served) time, making it challenging for surgeons without block time or needing additional time to access the OR. When there was time open and available in the OR, there was no easy way to advertise the time to surgeons and their schedulers.

When trying to reallocate block time, surgical services leadership found it difficult to make defensible decisions using traditional methods of measuring block utilization.

Both surgeons and leadership had limited visibility into operational metrics. Acquiring reports often took a significant amount of manual work, and it was not easy for surgeons and leadership to see detailed data when desired.

Baptist Health Jacksonville partnered with the LeanTaaS team to implement iQueue for Operating Rooms initially across Baptist South’s 11 ORs.

The Exchange module encouraged block owners to release time that they did not plan to use. Baptist could then advertise the newly open time using the “OpenTable” feature to maximize utilization of available OR time.

The Collect module allowed surgical services leadership to assess block usage in a surgeon-centric, defensible manner. They were able to identify opportunities to repurpose “Collectable” block time without negatively impacting surgeons’ practices.

The Analyze module gave both leadership and surgeons deep visibility into one source of truth for key operational metrics. Surgical services leadership used this data to identify specific opportunities to improve OR efficiency and take targeted actions. Surgeons were able to access their data anytime on both mobile and desktop, allowing them to better understand their OR usage.