Bringing More Accountability to Service Line Block Allocation Webinar transcript

MARIANNE BISKUP:. Hello, everyone. And welcome to today’s webinar, titled Bringing More Accountability to. Service Line Block Allocation. I’m Marianne Biskup. I’m the events manager at LeanTaaS iQueue. Before we begin the webinar, I’m just going to go over some brief housekeeping items for you. You’ll notice that you’re all muted. However, if you would like to submit a question, you can do so by clicking the Q&A icon. That’s on the upper right hand corner of your screen. And we’ll also have time at the end of the webinar to answer any questions you may have. So please use that icon. 

In addition, we’ll be sending out a link to the recording of this webinar, post webinar, look for that in about 24 hours, keep an eye out on your inbox. And now, I’d like to introduce today’s presenters. We have Utkarsh Vaidya, who is our product manager for LeanTaaS iQueue OR. And we also have. Drew Domagalski. And he’s a client implementation specialist. Take it away, Drew. 

DREW DOMAGALSKI:. Thank you, Marianne. Good morning, everyone, especially those joining us on the Pacific. Mountain and Central Time zones. And good afternoon to those on the East Coast who are now on lunch. Thank you for joining us today. As Marianne said, my name is Drew Domagalski. I’m one of the Client. Implementation Specialists here at LeanTaaS and a former Business Manager for Perioperative services at Presence Resurrection Medical Center in the greater Chicagoland area. Thank you for joining us today. We want to be respectful of your time so we’re going to be as concise as possible– wrap up this presentation in approximately 30 minutes to leave time for a brief question and answer session at the end. 

So to give some background on LeanTaaS, who we are, and what is iQueue? LeanTaaS is a Silicon Valley based software company that marries lean principles with predictive and prescriptive data analytics to achieve better health care through math. Thus far, we’ve raised in excess of $30 million in funding to develop our predictive analytics products. Two of which are active in the market today, one for infusion and one for the OR product. And part of that investment is currently allocated directly to research and development for future a new product lines. 

For example, we’re currently in discussions with Memorial Sloan Kettering developing a clinic’s products. To give a little background on our leadership and our company makeup, our company is led by former executives from Google and McKinsey. And the rest of our makeup consists of experts in lean principles, mathematicians, data scientists, engineers, product managers, and those who have a similar background to me who have worked in the perioperative space. The great thing about working here with you all and our customers is that we’re building products with our customers, and working collaboratively to share a success. So a quick look at where customers are now. 

We are currently working with approximately 46 of the top institutions in the country. The aforementioned. Sloan Kettering, Stanford, New York Pres, US. Health, Ohio State, et cetera. 15 of the top 30 cancer centers nationwide, seven in the top 10 are currently using our infusion products. And within the operative space, we’re live at eight institutions across approximately 400 ORs. And we’re in discussions with many others across the country. A quick overview of the agenda for today will touch on how the service block application is being misused, how we can improve it. Second, the importance of intelligent accountability for block allocation. Next, what you can increase in a service line accountability. 

And we’ll wrap things up with the deeper state of things for service line block allocation, and follow that up with the brief Q&A. So first, we’d like to start things off, and we’ll take it a step back to emphasize a little bit about patient care. If you brought your child to the hospital and you’re told to come back in 60 days, what would you do? What would your response be? I’m sure all of us who are present would be frustrated and really concerned about that unavailability of the OR. The reality is, is that you go and check the operating rooms at any individual hospital right now. There’s a high probability that one of those ORs is empty. And why is that? That’s due to the fact there’s always an error in predicting precisely when someone will use one spot within the operating room. That demand is volatile versus fixed. 

So what we know moving forward is that there’s an accountability gap when planning service line block allocation. For my experience and my peers experience across the country, this lack of accountability and this gap squeezes the most expensive and valuable resources in our hospitals, our operating rooms. And there’s no sense of responsibility in these instances to safe check resource allocation, such as staff and equipment and that availability. So we’re making decisions based on the scarcity of resources. The other thing is, from an administrative perspective, the OR real estate and its resources are perpetually at a premium. So the emphasis is always the right size our ORs to improve utilization, to generate the most revenue for hospitals. 

The other thing is with this lack of accountability due to service line allocation. There’s not really an incentive. And there aren’t any repercussions for improving block utilization due to the fact that why worry about block utilization if the accountability shared across an entire service line with your peers, potentially dozens of other providers. Surgeons have dedicated time for their office hours, clinic schedules, patient management and care, actual time in the operating rooms, and other administrative and/or academic responsibilities. Moving forward, what we also know, there’s enablers for service lines success. 

Those can be surgeons, business managers, service line administrators, clinical staff that fall within a certain specific service line or feel part of a service line team. So we have to think about this from a holistic standpoint, and ask the question by asking what do these key players need in order to succeed? Which are those four main points here you see on your screen. So the four items listed provide that foundation for an OR ecosystem that is designed to optimize actionability or marketplace liquidity, and resource allocation. Collectively, these four items are driven by increasing accountability to drive actionability. So there are a few obstacles that we’re facing here in terms of increased accountability for service line block allocation. 

The first is the personal, or the gentlemen’s, or the handshake agreements. It’s called many things at a different institutions. From my experience, working within the perioperative arena and outside of it, this is often a common occurrence. It’s also one of the greatest large threats to OR, operational excellence. Why is that? It’s because it decreases. OR marketplace liquidity, or aka open time. And that directly can foster a feast or famine ecosystem and disproportionate allocation between service lines. Their service clients who may or may not be hoarding block time, so that decreases that visibility into the OR and the liquidity of the marketplace because there’s always people who have blocked time are always asking for more block time. And people who don’t have block time are asking for that block time. And that just feeds into a vicious circle. 

So the lesson here is, if you follow those personal agreements to dictate your allocation, it’s going to decrease an actionability and accountability at your institutions. Our second obstacle is balancing accountability versus autonomy. Now, I think this picture really relates to scenarios each of us can have experience. And as silly as the picture may seem, I think it really drives the point home that shared accountability doesn’t really work. Our nautical friends here, really in the front of the boat, are too concerned about what’s going on at the bottom of the boat, other than the fact that they’re not accountable of it. So shared accountability is not optimal. It’s less actionable. And moving towards individual blocks will maximize utilization within the operating rooms. 

With multiple block owners within a service line, potentially a dozen or so, predictability really diminishes. So you have them think of the question, who’s really responsible for releasing block time throughout this service plan allocation? There’s no accountability. And there aren’t any repercussions. And this ties back to our accountability gap slide that we discussed just a few minutes ago. So really, we have minimize that individual ownership of whole repair and secure this boat. So our third obstacle is the secondary marketplace for OR time. So this marketplace is structured around freighting time, not blocks. So although access to the OR needs to be divided up into blocks, that’s from a strategic standpoint. At a tactical level, OR time is identified by minutes. And it’s the real commodity that we’re concerned about. So OR time can be used as a liquid commodity. 

But currently, the. EHR’s ethics, cerner, meditech, what have you, use this as a static resource. And so at this time, I’m going to transition the conversation over to my colleague,. Utkarsh, who’s going to examine this in more detail for us. UTKARSH VAIDYA: Thank you. So hi, everyone. I’m one of the product managers at LeanTaaS. So I’m really working closely with actually developing solutions for some of the problems that we mentioned earlier in this webinar. And really what we need to do here, really the lesson to take away from this slide is that we need to treat OR time as the liquid commodity that it is. And what we can really do is we can turn this vicious cycle into a virtuous cycle by tapping into the underlying liquidity. 

Because what that really does is it creates trust in the ability for surgeons to receive time when they need it. And with that, also, influences that a lot of time is often released because surgeons confident that they can receive time when they need the time. And so they tend not to hoard time as much. And what we notice from some of our implementations is that high releasers are also often high requesters of the secondary time, which means that they’re on the whole increase liquidity. And that provides flexibility, in general, to the ecosystem. And therefore, it’s beneficial for all players in the ecosystem. And so what we have here on the chart, I think, is a very important insight from the data. 

So we’re looking at the number of operating rooms that are run on average in the past year at one of our more mature customers. This facility has about 28 ORs that they run at any given time. And you can see by time of day– so if you look left to right, we start off at about 8:30 or 7:30 in the morning, depending on the day of the week. And what’s expected is that the productivity is going to tail off, but the important point to note is that only a couple of times during that entire week did they have an average of 26 or more ORs running. So what that tells you, going back to that previous slide, is if you have a patient that’s waiting for care, there’s almost always an. OR that’s empty, that’s waiting for a patient to be in it. So there’s always an OR that’s idling if you look at it at any given point in the day. So why does accountability matter? 

So aside from the obvious efficiency benefits, excuse me, there are many intangible benefits which are downstream effects of an increase in accountability. So let’s look at accountability as a tiered process. So there’s individual accountability. There’s group accountability. And finally, there’s organizational accountability. So even within a service line allocation model, every minute still must be accountable to someone. And the reason for this is if time is not indicated as available or used prior to the automatic deadline at an individual level, then it can create a scarcity mindset even within the service line because it really hides the true availability that’s open for different people within the service line. 

And so the bottom line is that with an increase in individual accountability, you can actually enable more liquidity even within the service line. So even within my slice of the pie as a service line, I can still create more efficiency. So that’s what the first level of efficiency is. With the group accountability, there’s really a tendency for service lines to hoard time because what happens is, when you have a right of first refusal for a time, you don’t really want to give that up until you’re sure whether you’re going to use it or not. But really, the important point to note is that if there’s more liquidity, there’s also more flexibility. So not only can service lines receive time on days that they need more time, they can feed into the overall marketplace and make time more interchangeable across different service lines. So adding group accountability creates a sense of ownership and responsibility at a service line level where you’re really accountable for your slice of the pie, and making it efficient. 

And finally, both of these translate up to organizational accountability where what really matters is how you’re utilizing your assets. And what that helps you accomplish as a goal, as an institutional goal, is it creates and fosters a culture of intelligent accountability where transparency and teamwork become the status quo. So it really leads to culture shift. So what can perioperative leaders, people like Drew,. CMIOs, COOs, CEOs expect from an increase in service line accountability? What can you expect as the downstream effects of this accountability change? And so let’s look at this top down. So you see a picture of like this iceberg where there’s the tip of the iceberg. And there’s a lot of underlying word that goes under to make that happen. And so if we take a top down view, then when you create a culture shift where you have this intelligent accountability, you really create a lot of trust and liquidity across the service lines. 

So service lines really start thinking of each other as teammates rather than something that’s a very competitive negotiation for time, et cetera. And this really drives positive engagement between all of the different players in the ecosystem, be it the surgical staff, the administrative staff, or the surgeons, the surgeons themselves, serve assign chairs, and perioperative leadership. And as the slide mentions, this really leads the group cohesion and forward thinking to help accomplish institutional goals also. And ultimately, this really changes your culture. And it brings transparency, integrity, unity, very positive qualities that help you accomplish overall institutional goals. 

But it isn’t just a top down effect either. There’s also a bottom up effect, which is when you foster a culture of accountability, if you make that a goal for your institution, there really are a lot of adjacent benefits that happen as you take that journey to move toward a culture of accountability. So some of the tangential or side effects of this are, it necessitates that you have a visibility into your performance and metrics. So really creates a culture of responsibility, and data driven, just a data driven mindset across all of the people at your institution. And it also has other benefits like it necessitates you have a better, for instance, a better block policy or better communication lines. And so there are other benefits that come from just undertaking this journey in the first place. 

So really, it’s not only about the journey. I mean, it’s not only about the destination. It’s also about the journey. So as everyone here knows, really the mean metric that matters is room utilization, right? So let me give you an example of an airline. So if we’re talking about Southwest, and I’m the CEO of southwest. I have 10 planes that are available to me. Two of those are sitting in the hangar. They’re never used. Out of the eight planes that are active, I’m using six of them at any given point. So my efficiency actually six over eight, or is my efficiency 6 over 10? Well, it’s really 6 over 10 because, theoretically, I have these 10 planes available, And Just like an airplane as an economic engine for the airline and/or as an economic engine for the hospitals, so when you’re not using one of your rooms for whatever reason, right? 

So agnostic of the actual reason itself, you’re actually losing efficiency. You’re losing money. You’re losing patient satisfaction. You’re losing provider satisfaction. And so the important question to ask yourself is, how much time did I have, theoretically, available? And how much of that time did I use? And when you start really tracking this metric, what you’ll notice is if your room utilization is going off through these efforts, then obviously, you’re doing well. Good things are happening. If your room utilization is still flat or is going down even, yeah, it means that you’re doing poorly. But what it really helps with is, it provides visibility into why that is. So there can be several bottlenecks as off for why that room utilization might be dipping. 

There might be a staffing constraint. There might be an anesthesia issue. There might be a surgeon issue. So it doesn’t necessarily always translate to being the surgeon’s fault.. There could be many reasons. But the important point is that once you provide visibility into this, room utilization and you track it, you can start pinpointing bottlenecks and try to address those in a more head on way. So what can we expect from an increase in service line? How can we shift this paradigm to actually change what service line allocation looks like in hospitals? So there’s really three aspects to this. So currently, ORs, we really view them as these interchangeable kind of LEGO bricks in theory. 

But in reality, we all know that they’re very hyper-constrained because of service line allocation. And on your EHR, blocks are used as placeholders to really limit access. So it’s more about an access thing rather than a planning thing. And you also use it for conflict management, which is I don’t want to overbook into my ORs. I don’t want to book 23 cases when I only have 22 ORs that I can run concurrently. But in reality, most ORs are actually interchangeable. So there are indeed some physical constraints to ORs, like size, or equipment, or what have you. But these can be tracked separately as a layer. So what we really need to do as a hospital leaders is, we need to adapt our way of thinking about OR allocation. And we need to decouple access that’s granted to the ORs, from the physical. ORs themselves. 

So we really don’t need to bind specific access levels to specific ORs. We can treat the ORs as a liquid asset or liquid commodity, like we mentioned earlier. And there’s a downstream benefit of this, which is we can start extracting significant efficiencies by really starting to pack cases together, which is not possible with the current paradigm. So we can start packing similar major cases, or we can start packing similar provider cases. We can start packing cases based on the surgical teams that are used for that. So this will start helping you improve your turnover metrics, your first case on-time start metrics, and really allow you to tap into that second level of efficiency. And so what does it push for an increase in individual accountability really do, right? So it helps to forecast a few things, which I think are very important for all hospital leaders. 

That helps you understand the true need for building new ORs. It helps to purchase targeted equipment rather than just purchasing based on, like an emotional need or your perception. It helps give you early clarity on any staffing or equipment bottlenecks that might happen, like two weeks, a week down the line. And looking toward the future, it helps to better forecast what your service line allocation or demand patterns are. So when you have your block committee meetings and you’re reallocating time, you’re like moving time around, it can really help you do that based on demand patterns rather than a perception, as I mentioned. And finally, it allows for more insightful planning for the future at an institution level. So what is the future of service line allocation look like?

All of us who are close to the operating room space really aware that these problems exist. So what can we do to mitigate them? And so there’s really three things that go into solving this problem. There’s visibility. There’s liquidity. And both of those leads to accountability. So visibility really breeds a sense of responsibility. But responsibility at its core is really based on altruism. And accountability is based on consequence. So there’s a gap between responsibility and accountability. And that gap is consequence. And so in addition to visibility, what you need to solve this problem is, you need to provide mechanisms to enhance the liquidity of your OR secondary marketplace. And that is what actually creates the accountability. So both of those things come together to accomplish the overarching goal, which is increase accountability and enhance transparency. 

And that’s precisely what our product, which is iQueue for Operating. Rooms was created for. And it was created keeping this kind of principle in mind. And so we’re really solving three main issues. We’re solving the issue of reporting transparency. And what we’re really doing is we’re trying to make the right information available to the right person at the right time. And the module that addresses that, we call analyze. And we are also trying to solve. OR access and utilization, in general, by really creating an OpenTable for OR time to manage that, to allow releases, to allow requests. And we use the Exchange module for that, which I’ll cover in just a second. And finally, Collectable. 

Time is a new concept that we’re introducing because block allocation is really a broken metric. And we have some more material around that. If you’d like to reference that, you can go to our website. It has several webinars that talk about why block allocation is in the best metric, and why Collectable Time as a new metric is a lot better. And I’ll talk about that in a second also. First module, analyze. You can see kind of like a demo playing in the left corner. That’s our surgeon view. So when a surgeon or when an admin logs them from their phone, they’re able to see this, all of their metrics, in a very clean user’s experience. They’re able to see a consolidated view for all their metrics. And so really, the problem we’re trying to solve here is that there’s no single source of truth. 

There are a lot of reports flying around in a hospital ecosystem. From many sources, they’re often not aligned. And so what we’re doing is we’re aligning these metrics. We’re clearly and crisply defining them. And we’re creating a single source of truth across the hospital. There’s a lot of this notion of looking backwards, and just what we call admiring the problem. None of this is actionable. I can tell you your block utilization is 50%. What does that actually mean? I’m not really giving you more information. I’m not telling you how to mitigate that, right? So, yeah, visibility is important. But what’s more important is actionable insight. And so that’s what we do with this analyzed module, which is we look at the trends in data. We look at anomalies in the data. And we really start to highlight your opportunities for improvement. 

Data is often hard to access. It’s paper based, like people put it on bulletin boards. People like, physically print it out. And so what we’ve done is we’ve taken all of that away, all of the noise. And we have a mobile view. And we have a web view. And both of these are web accessible. So you don’t need to download any app. You just punch in the URL on your mobile browser. And you’re able to view these as long as you have access to that at an institutional level. And finally, as we’ve been talking about through this webinar, there’s a lot of credibility and transparency, data’s often question. And so what we’ll do is we’ll have these extremely crisply defined, well-socialized definitions for the data. So everyone’s looking at Apple samples. People aren’t looking, and slicing, and dicing of the data in different ways. So the second module, that’s Exchange. Exchange is really simple. It’s a marketplace for trading operating room time, right? 

The secondary marketplace that we talked about earlier where you’re trading minutes instead of blocks. That’s what Exchange is. So you can see how you can request time going on on the left. That’s how the actual mobile version of the product looks. And so the problem, as we all know, is limited visibility into open time, especially if you’re a community hospital. Your surgeons might not even have access to the actual grid on the EHR. So they’ll call in. And they’ll ask the OR scheduling office, hey, can I get some time on Monday? Can I get some time on Tuesday? There’s a lot of this messy back and forth. There’s no clear way to define who came first, whose need is higher, et cetera, et cetera. And so what we’re doing is we’re making this very simple. 

We’re providing full visibility to all of the players in that ecosystem. And we’re also making this web accessible, so everyone sees the same availability in a very abstract level. So the only thing that your surgeons really care about is getting access to the operating room time. And we’re making that really simple. You just go in. You ask for the type of time that you want. And you can put in a request that gets either approved or denied. And so what if you need time on day that doesn’t have availability? Well, instead of doing all the back and forth with your scheduling office, you can simply set an alert for a day where there’s no time available. And we call that the wish list. 

So it’s kind of like an Amazon wish list where you might not want to purchase something today, or something might not be available today. I’ll just set a reminder for myself for the system to inform me when that time actually becomes available. And the other thing is that there’s no motivation really for people to release time. And another problem is that sometimes there is motivation for people to release time. But people are so busy, like surgeons are so busy, schedulers are so busy that they might just forget to do that, right? There’s not a maliciousness behind it. It’s just that there’s so many things going on that you might simply forget to do that. And that really creates a problem because it creates a scarcity mindset, an artificial scarcity, that exacerbated the overall secondary OR marketplace liquidity issue. 

And so what we do is we will send out these intelligent release reminders, is what we call them. So if we notice that a provider or a office has not put in case a sense of block when we expect them to put cases into the blocks, we’ll actually send them a reminder to tell them to release that time. And finally, there’s a lot of email, and texts, and notes flying about. So we’ll streamline everything. We’ll have a streamlined audit trail that’s good on the product as well as on the application itself. And we send that out through email. So there’s a very consolidated audit trail that people can go back to if they need to look at something. 

How am I on time? OK. So the final module is Collect. And Collect is really our paradigm shifting module. And I don’t really have enough time to cover this in depth, but you can definitely find more information about this from some of the other webinars that we’ve done, or on our website. And the fundamental problem is that block utilization is a broken metric. It’s an OK input metric, but it’s a terrible output metric because surgery is inherently variable. And there’s a lot of volatility because there’s no way to perfectly predict how much time you actually need for surgery. There’s always going to be that inherent amount of unpredictability with surgery. And so it’s really hard to enforce any type of blog policy that’s based on block utilization because surgeons are always going to have valid as well as sometimes invalid reasons for why block utilization isn’t the right metric to look at. 

And so we’ve defined this new metric called Collectible Time. And all it really does is it looks at usable chunks of time rather than just block utilization as a flat metric. So really quick example, if your block utilization is 75%, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I can take away 25% of your time. Because some of that time that you didn’t use in that 25% might be like 30-minute case flipping times between two cases that you did. That doesn’t really mean that I can reclaim that time and put a case in it. So it’s effectively useless for me to look at that time, and consider that in my decision making do for your allocation or performance. And so what Collectible Time does is, it defines a usable time or reclaimable time. That’s why we call it collectible. And it’s based around three main categories around completely on utilized blocks that were left completely empty that were owned by a particular block owner. 

It looks like chunks of time that are larger than a given threshold so say, three hours. And it finally looks at time that was released beyond a certain threshold, for instance, 20% of the overall allocation. And so really, what we’re doing with Collectible Time is we’re creating a fairer, more transparent block policy that’s also automated. And we start creating these really accountable moves for your strategic allocation needs. And again, like I mentioned, block utilization as an input metric is meaningless. And so we created this block supply table where we can look at the low hanging fruit, which are the block owners who can perform all of their surgeries, and really address all of their demand without actually needing the amount of block time that they’re currently allocated. 

So there’s really no losers with this kind of mindset because you’re never taking time away from block owner that they actually need. You’re only taking time away from a block owner that they don’t really need to service their forecasted demand. And so I want to hand it off to Drew over here to talk about a case study that we did with our first and flagship customer, a University of Colorado Health. 

DREW DOMAGALSKI:. Thank you, Utkarsh. So this case study shows our first customer who we partnered with to help develop the tool as well, at UC Health’s flagship hospital in the Metro Denver area. So the iQueue product for ORs was implemented throughout their 32 total operating rooms, and following implementation, and around the 10-month period approximately. Their ROI was calculated at approximately $400,000 of additional revenue per OR per year. The 4% increase in utilization, 10% earlier block releases, and 47% median increase in blocks released per month. This shows that shifting the paradigm and increasing accountability yields great results, especially at an institutional level, through that culture change, and through adopting more accountability and best practice models. They are able to really generate a lot of positive dividends for their institution. And we’ll be able to send out a copy of the case study, if you’re interested in supplemental materials following the presentation. 

And lastly, these are just several testimonials that we have from our customers that we’re working with. And the most exciting part about this is, the most rewarding aspect is that these testimonials not only show how our customers and us shared success, but shows how we built products together through collaboration and communication. So we do work with you in the future at your organizations. We welcome any feedback regarding our product, any recommendations for enhancing the user experience, the functionality, just the overall breadth that it brings to your institution so that we can continue to enhance that product line for you, and continue to create better or better health through math. So in closing, that concludes our presentation today. I want to thank you all for your participation. We appreciate your time. And now, we’ll start the Q&A portion of the discussion, if there are any questions that we’d like to be answered. 

MARIANNE BISKUP: OK. Well, I see that we already have a few questions coming in. As a reminder to all of you, if you wish to submit a question, you can utilize the Q&A icon, in this right hand corner of your screen. First question that we have, how do we get our staff/personnel to buy in and make this happen? 

DREW DOMAGALSKI: Yeah, that is a very good question. Using the service line block system, to set up their service line allocation is inherently suboptimal from a visibility and efficiency perspective. In my past experience,. I’ve had successes by getting key stakeholders involved, by increasing transparency to the marketplace first and foremost. This kind of breeds a sense of accountability and helps propel data driven conversations. It also can allow for better preparation for OR planning from a staffing, in an equipment perspective. Is there anything you want to add UV? 

UTKARSH VAIDYA: I think you kind of covered it all. 

MARIANNE BISKUP: OK. We got a few more questions here. Can this be applied to community hospitals and academic medical centers? 

UTKARSH VAIDYA: I can take that one. Yeah, definitely can be applied to both community hospitals and academic medical centers. So we have implemented this at the University of Colorado Health, which is a massive academic institution. They were a first customer. And they’re our flagship customer as well. And we’ve also implemented this product at OhioHealth, which is in kind of the Columbus area. And they’re a community ecosystem, as well as MultiCare in Tacoma, up in Washington. And they’re also a large community system. So the challenges that we’re really solving or mitigating are they’re the same– the problems are the same across hospitals nationwide. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a community hospital or an academic hospital because the paradigm shift that we’re talking about here, it has hard and soft benefits that every hospital in America can benefit from, right? You have increases in block and room utilization. You have revenue growth. You have improved surgeon and staff satisfaction. And all of this feels really high returns. 

And so in community hospitals, in particular, I just want to add that we really see these tools being used for recruitment purposes as well because it’s so easy to access time in the OR. So a lot of our customers, for instance, when they have onboard neurosurgeons in the community setting, sometimes they won’t allocate them permanent block time. They’ll just tell them to pick up time from the secondary marketplace rather than allocating them a permanent block allocation. And in the academic setting, we kind of see something similar. 

They add new surgeons without immediately having to find them block time on the schedule. They can allow these new surgeons to gradually build their business, build their practice, and use the secondary marketplace, the liquidity that’s extracted from surgery being a flexible, inherently flexible things. You can extract that liquidity. And you can apply it to allow newer surgeons to build their practice without immediately slicing up the overall allocation. 

MARIANNE BISKUP: We’ve got another question here. Can addressing this paradigm help manage add-on cases? 

DREW DOMAGALSKI:. Yeah, absolutely. By addressing the service line allocation constructs and adopting a more individualized ecosystem, you’re essentially promoting a type of ownership and accountability within your institution. And in result, you’re going to have less hoarding of block time and increasing likelihood for block releases. You’re going to have earlier, more frequent releases. And in result, you’re going to see a more liquid OR marketplace. 

MARIANNE BISKUP: OK. Well, it looks like that’s it for the questions today. I want to thank all of you for joining us on today’s webinar, and especially a huge thanks to Drew and UV, part of our stellar OR team. Thanks for presenting today guys. As a reminder to all of you, keep an eye on your inbox. We’ll be sending out a link to a recording of this webinar in the next 24 hours. Thanks again for joining us.