Summary
OhioHealth is a family of not-for-profit hospitals and healthcare facilities in Central Ohio. The largest hospital in the system, Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, is a 1,059-bed teaching institution that has served patients since 1892.
Problem
Like many ORs, the center was subject to inefficient scheduling practices, staffing resource constraints that impeded scheduling even further, and poorly informed management of surgical block time due to data availability.
Specifically, when making surgical bookings, the center used surgeon requests as their reference point for case length times, which often did not account for the actual case time that would be required in practice. This practice led to highly inaccurate case times and surgeons booking well past their allotted blocks, causing staff burnout and excessive overtime. To mitigate this, the center started to use their EHR-provided case length averaging tool, which did increase their case length accuracy (CLA) somewhat. But the center still had further opportunity to achieve more precise CLA, as well as improve the OR scheduling process overall.
Solution
To improve scheduling efficiencies, the center went live with iQueue for Operating Rooms in September 2022. iQueue’s Exchange module supported a highly visible marketplace for OR time, allowing schedulers to release and claim time efficiently, and the Case Scheduling module helped fit cases more efficiently into the time available. To provide stronger data overall, the center also leveraged the Analyze module, so stakeholders could easily find and access reliable performance information, track trends and identify opportunities to grow.
Several months after the initial go-live, the center also decided to give clinics full visibility into how long their cases were truly taking, and to do so deployed iQueue’s CLA function. After the center requested this feature in December 2022, a tip sheet was sent to clinic schedulers informing them on the new field being added to their workflows, and LeanTaaS then implemented the CLA tool in January 2023. This immediately gave clinics even better insights into how much time their cases took, and also a clearer understanding of actual staffing needs in the OR.
