Success Stories

UCHealth Unlocked $400k Revenue per OR per Year

47% Median increase in blocks released per month

4% Increase in OR utilization

10% Earlier block releases

$400k Estimated additional revenue per OR per year

Summary

UCHealth’s hospitals and clinics have been trusted healthcare destinations for generations of Coloradans. Today, based on four consecutive years of recognition of their superior nursing processes and quality patient care from the American Nurses Credentialing Center and their ranking as one of the top 15 hospitals in the country by US News and World Report, UCHealth hospitals are uniquely positioned to meet the healthcare needs of families throughout the Rocky Mountain region and the entire United States.

Profile

12-hospital academic health system

140 ORs, 85,000+ cases performed per year

33 ORs in flagship hospital

Problem

UCHealth perioperative leadership wanted to improve OR utilization to accommodate new growth. Previous initiatives in the UCHealth perioperative space focused on first-case-on-time starts and turnover times that had not made significant, substantive, nor sustainable improvements. UCHealth perioperative leadership knew their volume was likely to continue to increase before new operating rooms (ORs) could be built. Feeling a sense of urgency and pressure to increase OR utilization with a scalable approach, leaders turned to LeanTaaS, a partner with whom they had worked with to improve operations in their ten infusion centers.

Solution

To begin addressing these issues, UCHealth perioperative leaders partnered with LeanTaaS to deploy iQueue for Operating Rooms Exchange and Analyze modules throughout 25 inpatient and eight outpatient ORs at their metro Denver location at the UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital. These two modules offered ways for surgeons and their schedulers to carefully assess their performance and easily release and claim time. After seeing the impact these had on improving utilization, UCHealth perioperative leaders extended the use of iQueue to their other community hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers. iQueue for Operating Rooms’ modular approach allows healthcare providers the flexibility to deploy modules individually or in any combination.

With access to data-driven performance metrics and the ability to release and/or request block time without an endless series of phone calls, emails, and faxes, UCHealth surgeons have enthusiastically embraced iQueue for Operating Rooms and contributed to noticeable results.

iQueue is a far more scientific way of managing OR capacity and creating access to OR time, accountability for block time, and transparency into operating metrics. The changes to our core processes for release and request, block rightsizing, and transparency into the metrics is exactly what we needed. This is the future of OR capacity management

Steve Hess

CIO, UCHealth