Success Stories

OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital Realized $5.5 Million in Newly Captured OR Time

3,520 Hours of capacity released through Exchange

62k Minutes of OR time requested through Exchange

130 Blocks identified using Collect

12 Blocks per month repurposed using Collect

Summary

OhioHealth is a family of not-for-profit hospitals and healthcare facilities in Central Ohio. Serving patients since 1892, Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, is a 1,059-bed teaching institution and the largest hospital in the OhioHealth system. The flagship hospital shares the OhioHealth mission “to improve the health of those we serve”. It is recognized locally, regionally, and nationally for quality healthcare and consistently ranked one of the nation’s best hospitals.

Profile

1,059 bed teaching hospital

24 ORs

30,000 cases performed per year

Problem

OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital wanted to increase access to the operating room (OR) and accountability for allocated block time. Its Surgical Services leadership team had this focus on operating metrics such as volume, utilization, and growth with surgeon satisfaction. The OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital leadership team perceived there to be significant operating capacity and unused block time, but had little insight into exactly where the opportunities to utilize these resources existed. Furthermore, previous block management approaches, based on broken metrics like block utilization, made it challenging to hold surgeons accountable for unused block time. To drive the right outcomes at OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital, the leadership team knew they needed a solution with embedded predictive and prescriptive analytics that would help transform core operational processes

Solution

The Surgical Services leadership team partnered with LeanTaaS to implement iQueue for Operating Rooms at OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital. iQueue’s Exchange and Collect modules helped transform traditional business operations to drive increased access and enhance accountability for the use of allocated block time.

The Exchange module identified and exposed the inventory of open time to OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital surgeons and their clinic schedulers. Based on historical booking patterns, Exchange was able to identify surgeons who had not booked cases into their block and proactively remind them to release potential unused time. After inventory was exposed, the “OpenTable” feature allowed for immediate access to available operating time for surgeons who did not have allocated block time or needed additional operating time.

The Collect module provided the Surgical Services leadership team with a surgeon-centric metric to evaluate the performance of all block owners, by mining patterns of OR usage by block owner and identifying portions of time that could truly be repurposed or “collectable”. The module allowed the leadership team to repurpose unused block time without impacting surgeons' existing case volume at OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital.

Several months after deploying iQueue, OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital reported increased capacity, access, and accountability in the OR.

We really needed to create access to the OR. Exchange went above and beyond our prior manual process, it gave transparency to open OR time, it eliminated a lot of the back and forth phone calls and it gave us flexibility to create open time that wasn’t previously available. When we had new surgeons join, we were able to get them time. Collect was telling us the same story, but in a way that was more surgeon-focused. It helped us directionally decide what worked best for the OR schedule.

Juli Kerscher

MSN, RN, Business Operations Manager, Perioperative Services, OhioHealth