Success Stories

UCHealth Cancer Care Reduced Overtime Hours by 28%

33% Lower waiting times at peak hours

15% Lower average waiting time

14% Higher patient volumes

28% Lower overtime hours

Summary

Part of the 12-hospital UCHealth system, UCHealth Cancer Care – Anschutz Medical Campus in metro Denver is linked with the University of Colorado Cancer Center, the state’s only NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center – and one of only 71 in the nation. UCHealth Cancer Care patients gain the benefit of groundbreaking research and clinical trials plus exemplary patient care. UCHealth Cancer Care 5-year cancer outcomes far outpace state averages as well as those of many other cancer centers in the U.S.

Profile

247 chairs

16 centers

Epic EHR

NCI / NCCN designation

Academic Medical Center

Colorado

Problem

UCHealth Cancer Care needed to continue accommodating growth in volume using the space it had, and ensure its busy nurses and staff were able to manage their workloads. Like many high-volume facilities, however, the center was experiencing operational barriers that challenged these goals. UCHealth Cancer Care saw daily triangular usage profiles that resulted in excess capacity sitting idle in the mornings and evenings and peaks at midday. These led to long patient wait times during high-demand appointment times in the middle of the day, and high costs in overtime as nurses had to stay past the scheduled end of their shifts to catch up after the earlier influx of patients. Overall resources at UCHealth Cancer Care were not being used optimally.

Solution

To begin solving these issues, UCHealth leadership deployed iQueue for Infusion Centers at a UCHealth Cancer Care site with 28 chairs and 6 private rooms. It aimed to create optimized infusion scheduling templates that better predicted and distributed each day’s appointment load. After that center realized significant results in the first site, including a dramatically flattened utilization curve that supported even workloads and unlocked capacity to accommodate delays and add-ons, iQueue was deployed at 6 additional UCHealth Cancer Care sites, collectively adding 104 more chairs.

iQueue uses data science and machine learning to create optimized scheduling templates in order to continuously maximize patient flow and chair usage. The results were dramatic.

Jamie Bachman

Former Executive Director, Oncology Services, UCHealth