With continued mounting pressures to reduce healthcare costs, healthcare providers can leverage the lessons learned in the 90’s by the world’s leading manufacturing companies. This blog is the first in a series of blogs that will discuss how healthcare organizations can employ manufacturing best practices to reduce costs, increase efficiency and improve patient satisfaction. Given that this is a business intelligence blog, the focus will be on how existing data can be transformed into information to achieve the aforementioned healthcare objectives.
The first area of focus, the operating room, has several manufacturing parallels. Think of an operating room as a machine that is very expensive to operate and has a fixed amount of capacity that must be optimally used to maximize utilization. Downtime due to poor scheduling or delays in preceding processes impacts utilization, output and customer satisfaction.
Leading manufactures learned that to improve utilization, they must first measure machine utilization and then dig into the drivers that impact utilization such as efficiency, scheduling and volume. These same principles can apply to the operating room. Thus healthcare providers should look to report on:
- Operating Room Utilization
- Case and Procedure Volume
- Operating Room Efficiency
- Operating Room Schedules and Scheduling Efficiency
- Volume, Utilization and Efficiency Trends
With this type of information at hand, a healthcare organization can identify improvement opportunities by comparing metrics across dimensions such as of time of day, day of week, facility and service to spot improvement opportunities and measure the impact of best practices.
In addition to internal comparison’s third party information is also available to determine how an institution’s operating room performance compares to industry benchmarks. McKesson’s OR Benchmarks Collaborative™ (ORBC) is a "vendor-neutral" healthcare business intelligence solution and operating room benchmarking service provided by McKesson. Subscribers use our secure Web-based scorecard to analyze and compare their organization's performance against internal and national benchmarks and trends.
Getting started with Operating Business Intelligence typically begins with defining the metrics to measured. Fortunately, Oracle has already defined most of the metrics and embodied them in a pre-defined packaged dashboarding and reporting solution called Oracle Operating Room Analytics. Within a short period of time, an healthcare organization can be quickly up and running and begin to measure performance and identify improvement opportunities.
A summary of the dashboards and dashboard pages available in Oracle Operating Room Analytics are shown below:
- Summary Dashboard
- Anesthesia
- Operational
- Service
- Enterprise Reports Dashboard
- Efficiency Scorecard
- Operational
- OR Utilization
- Prime Time Gap/Turnover Utilization
- Volume Dashboard
- Case Trends
- Cases
- Patient Classification
- Procedure Trends
- Procedures
- Top N
- Utilization Dashboard
- Utilization
- Utilization Trends
- Anesthesia Durations
- Case Estimates
- Delays
- Efficiency Summary
- Efficiency Trends
- Postop Durations
- Prolonged Turnovers
- Schedule Changes
- Transition Turnovers
- Turnovers
- Schedule Cases
- Trends
- Schedule Cases
