iQueue for Operating Rooms Case Study – MultiCare

MultiCare is a not-for-profit health care organization caring for the Washington State community for well over a century. Consistently ranked as one of the nation’s Most Wired health care organizations by Hospitals & Health Networks magazine, MultiCare is committed to providing outstanding care to residents of the Pacific Northwest through its eight hospitals, as well as through its robust network of primary, virtual, urgent and specialty care services.

MultiCare schedulers, administrators and department chairs were burdened with reconciling the needs for more OR access and the day-today constraints limiting surgeon satisfaction. Leadership was also aware that the prerequisites for attracting new surgeons and accommodating those already hampered with a significant backlog was reaching a tipping point. MultiCare leadership needed a scalable, cost-effective solution that would address these challenges, maintain their innovative brand and ensure a strong return on investment. MultiCare turned to LeanTaaS, with whom they had worked to overcome challenges in their MultiCare Tacoma General Hospital Infusion Center.

Working with their LeanTaaS counterparts, MultiCare executives and physician leadership initiated a pilot program to:

• Reduce the number of fully blocked operating room schedules
• Accommodate new surgeons and day-of add-on cases
• Eliminate surgeon case backlogs

In February 2018, MultiCare deployed iQueue for Operating Rooms’ three modules:

• Exchange, for releasing and requesting open time via any web browser, mobile or desktop
• Collect, for reviewing the real-time block supply table
• Analyze, for immediate reporting of OR utilization

Less than four months following the pilot’s launch, the results revealed that 75 active clinic schedulers and over 77 surgeons – out of the nearly 100 active – had participated in an Exchange transaction. Within the next several months, iQueue for Operating Rooms enabled thousands of block transactions and reclaimed millions of dollars of block time.