iQueue for Operating Rooms Case Study – Parkview Medical Center

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 including the region’s only certified and verified Level II Trauma Center as well as the region’s first certified Stroke Center.

Parkview Medical Center is the leader in cardiac, women’s, emergency, and neurological services as well as behavioral health programs. As a vital healthcare source, Parkview’s service area includes Pueblo County and 14 surrounding counties, which together represent 350,000 total lives.

Parkview Medical Center faced a series of challenges that contributed to decreased efficiency in their operating rooms. These included:

• Inaccurate performance metrics due to non-standard EHR workflows. The process of compiling and validating manual reports was far too cumbersome, and as a result, there wasn’t a credible set of KPIs that could be used to make decisions.
• No existing mechanism to right-size block time. Block utilization data was not credible, and prevented the OR Committee from being able to identify low performing block owners. This made it difficult to find additional OR time for physicians with growing practices, as well as for new physicians.
• Limited access to available open (first come first serve) time that required several back and forth phone calls with OR scheduling. This would result in affiliated surgeons potentially losing potential patients to other neighboring markets.

Each of iQueue for Operating Rooms’s three modules has provided tremendous value for Parkview. The Analyze module has, for the first time, given the leadership team timely, actionable metrics based on credible data. Given the way that Parkview had set up their EHR, they weren’t able to extract meaningful data from it. But through working with the iQueue team in the implementation phase, Parkview is now able to capture their key performance metrics as intended, and are able to understand the true nature of their OR performance.

The Collect module allowed Parkview to establish an independent block committee for block management, and gave them a powerful, surgeon-centric metric for right-sizing block allocation in the form of collectable time. With collectable time, Parkview was able to make data-backed decisions about which block owners they should take time away from in a way that didn’t impact existing case volume.

Finally, the Exchange module has provided visibility into the inventory of open time in the OR which has made it far more liquid and accessible. iQueue has significantly streamlined the scheduling process at Parkview, which has been a huge satisfier to both the physician and patient populations. In the words of Dr. James Caldwell, Medical Director of Surgical Services at Parkview: “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.”

Parkview was so happy with the results of their initial implementation that they decided to expand the scope of the tool to serve their outpatient and endoscopy centers, bringing the total number of ORs using iQueue for Operating Rooms from 12 to 20. The partnership between LeanTaaS and Parkview is poised to be a success in the years to come.