iQueue for Operating Rooms Case Study – Novant Health

Headquartered in North Carolina, Novant Health is a non-profit integrated healthcare network with 15 hospitals across multiple states that has 123 operating rooms and more than 680 clinics offering advanced medical treatments. Utilizing purposeful innovation is fundamental to Novant Health’s strategy of delivering patients an exceptional healthcare experience.

Prior to COVID-19, Novant Health was faced with meeting substantial growth targets to scale their organization. Opportunities for growth included:

• Attracting community surgeons within a competitive market;
• Enabling Surgeons to find open OR time; and
• Streamlining the OR scheduling process to accommodate new surgeons within existing capacity.

As the pandemic advanced Novant Health, along with most hospitals across the country, faced a shortage of available operating room time, elective surgery backlogs, and low block utilization. Recognizing the highly competitive market, their system leadership needed a unified approach for making key decisions such as block time allocations, block release times, and streamlining operational improvements. System leadership was also seeking a credible “single source of truth” across all facilities for greater visibility and transparency into key metrics system-wide.

In order to address needs for greater accessibility to operating room time as well as increased visibility and transparency into operating room utilization, Novant Health partnered with LeanTaaS and selected iQueue for Operating Rooms. The health system understood that deploying the software, despite the pandemic, was necessary and proceeded to remotely implement iQueue across its North Carolina facilities.
By deploying iQueue for Operating Rooms, Novant Health sought to increase surgeon engagement as well as the surgeon’s accountability for use of their allocated time, add transparency related to data-driven decision-making, and build surgeons trust in the data. Novant Health’s Surgical Services Leadership understood that the software and partnership would be a means to adopt a new, more surgeon-centric framework for measuring OR utilization.