Success Stories

Parkview Medical Center Built a 21-day Average Block Release Lead Time

15 Blocks per month released

21 Day average block release lead time

11 Blocks per month requested

20% Decrease in minutes from entirely unused allocated blocks

Summary

Parkview Medical Center is a community hospital based in Pueblo, Colorado, offering general acute healthcare and behavioral health specialty services. As a private, non-profit organization, Parkview is licensed for 350 beds and provides a full range of healthcare services.

With both a Level II Trauma Center and Stroke Center, Parkview covers Pueblo County and 14 surrounding counties, which together represent 350,000 total lives.

Profile

350 bed community hospital

Level II Trauma Center and Stroke Center

14-country, 350,000-patient footprint

Problem

Parkview Medical Center’s OR efficiency challenges included inaccurate performance metrics due to non-standard EHR workflows. The process of creating manual reports was far too cumbersome, and there wasn’t a credible set of KPIs that could be used to make decisions. There also existed no mechanism to right-size block time at Parkview Medical Center. Block utilization data was not credible, so OR Committee members were unable to identify low performing block owners. Finding additional OR time for new physicians or those with growing practices was difficult.

Finally, access to available open first-come, first-serve time was limited, and booking this time required several back and forth phone calls with OR scheduling. Affiliated surgeons risked losing patients to neighboring markets.

Solution

To address these issues, Parkview Medical Center partnered with LeanTaaS to deploy iQueue for Operating Rooms. The iQueue Analyze module has since given the Parkview Medical Center leadership team timely, actionable KPIs based on credible data. The Collect module allowed Parkview Medical Center to establish an independent committee for block management, and gave them an accurate, surgeon-centric metric for right-sizing block allocation in the form of “collectable time.” The Exchange module provided visibility into the inventory of open OR time, making it more accessible. iQueue has significantly streamlined the scheduling process at Parkview Medical Center, a huge satisfier for physicians and patients.

Upon seeing the iQueue results, Parkview Medical Center expanded the scope of iQueue to serve their outpatient and endoscopy centers, for a total of 20 ORs.

Exchange has made the surgeons so happy, and we’re getting patients in faster, so it has increased surgeon satisfaction, increased patient satisfaction, and has made the whole scheduling process outside of normal block time smoother. It has fixed so many problems and streamlined our systems so much.

James Caldwell MD

Medical Director of Surgical Services at Parkview