Time To Overhaul Your OR?
Satisfied patients are a powerful marketing tool for health care organizations, as one hospital learned when it overhauled the scheduling and management of its operating rooms (ORs). The efforts led to increased efficiency and patient satisfaction and helped boost profitability.
Dr. Adam Blomberg, Vice Chief of Anesthesiology and Co-Medical Director of the Surgical Services Executive Committee at Memorial Regional Hospital in Florida, explains that a few years ago the hospital administrators realized that the OR could be run more effectively if they scrutinized the way things “had always been done before.” Well-run ORs are typically high profit centers.
“We felt like we needed to make improvements,” Blomberg says. “We wanted to become the best operating room in not only the region, but in the country … We wanted surgeons to come from all over to operate here” and to know that their patients will get high-quality, convenient care, he adds.
How did the overhaul turn out? Day-of-surgery cancellations were about 8 percent of all surgeries in 2011 and are 3 percent today. The turnover time, or the time before one patient’s surgery ends and another’s surgery begins in the OR, was 38 minutes in 2011 compared to an average of 26 minutes now. There is also an expected net income increase of over $2 million.
So how did Memorial Regional Hospital do it? Find out in our new article, Hospital Operating Room Overhaul Lifts Efficiency and Patient Satisfaction.
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