Background
Woman’s Hospital is a specialty hospital that primarily serves women and infants in Baton Rouge, La., and the surrounding regions. In its unique model of care, most physicians on the medical staff at Woman’s are independent providers not employed by the hospital. This adds an additional level of complexity to scheduling surgical procedures and increases the need for a system to coordinate this process among physicians in various independent practices. By implementing iQueue for Operating Rooms, Woman’s Hospital aimed to improve accessibility to their ORs and provide visibility into available OR time.
Through implementing the Case Scheduling feature within Exchange, surgeons and their staff can submit requests for time including all relevant case details required to book the case. Initial feedback before launch indicated that several clinics prioritized time to submit their case over all other efficiencies realized through Case Scheduling. Surgeons were questioning whether the iQueue process would be faster than their old workflow which relied on calling the OR scheduling team directly.
In coordination with the Woman’s Hospital Perioperative team, a time study was done to compare the time required to submit a case via iQueue versus time to submit via the old call-in workflow.
Time study results
To conduct the time study, LeanTaaS compared iQueue back-end data to phone data which was collected via the OR Scheduling team at Woman’s Hospital. Both the iQueue and phone data include time to schedule, reschedule, cancel a case, or edit patient information. Two months of user data was collected to make the comparison.
Scheduling within iQueue was found to be 12% more efficient when compared to the old call-in workflow, averaging 3 minutes and 6 seconds to submit a case with all the required case details. In addition, iQueue users saw efficiency gains month over month as they became more familiar with the process, with the most efficient user only requiring 2 minutes and 20 seconds to submit a case (on average).
Additional benefits and efficiencies
The time study results demonstrate a “time to submit” benefit for users leveraging Case Scheduling. However, additional efficiencies gained via Exchange plus Case Scheduling provide significant benefit across all users.
Single source for all scheduling tasks
Create a single source of truth for all scheduling activities within one consolidated platform- no more monitoring email, fax, and phone channels.
Optimize room and time placement
iQueue’s proprietary “Find Best Match” algorithm takes service line, robot constraints, and surgeon preference into account to recommend an optimal room and time
24/7 visibility and accessibility
Visibility into block and open time for clinics and surgeons allows cases to be submitted by clinics 24/7
Easily reschedule canceled cases
Canceled cases can be easily rescheduled with just a few clicks, preventing cases from falling through the crack
Reduce transcription errors and incomplete case details
Directly input case details from iQueue into the EHR for a reduction in transcription errors. Required fields also eliminate the submission of incomplete case details.
Bottom-line
Case Scheduling is a more efficient way to book cases when compared to scheduling workflows at institutions not using iQueue. Surgeons and schedulers realize numerous efficiency gains beyond time to submit a case when leveraging Exchange plus Case Scheduling.
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