Wrote copy for eBook targeting hospital administrators and surgical operations staff discussing the benefits of implementing a business intelligence tool in a hospital's operating room suite.

1. Identifying performance pain points to reap remarkable results
A publication of
© Copyright 2013. Surgical Information Systems. All Rights Reserved. V11052013 | LBL-40-0002.

2. 3 Reasons To Dig Deeper into Your Hospital’s OR Data
INTRODUCTION
As a member of your hospital’s OR and management team, you understand the
complexities of the surgery department and the importance of advancing patient safety
and quality outcomes. On one hand, the OR is the financial engine of your hospital,
generating up to 70% of its revenue and 55% of its operating margin1. The flip side is
that the OR also accounts for nearly 50% of your hospital’s costs and medical errors.
Add to that a mix of changing regulations and a volatile healthcare reform landscape and
you quickly realize your team needs accurate and timely perioperative data that gives
you insights into how to succeed in this environment.
The OR accounts for1:
1
Report by Towers Perrin (now Towers Watson), 2004
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3. 3 Reasons To Dig Deeper into Your Hospital’s OR Data
While tracking and monitoring the perioperative process is important, analyzing your
surgery department’s performance measures is just as critical.
Your hospital’s surgical care team can use near real-time data to analyze key
business, financial, and clinical measures to help:
Boost financial performance
Increase operational efficiencies
Support quality compliance and patient safety improvement measures
This eBook will identify pain points you may be experiencing in the OR and explain
why digging deeper into your surgical data can support your goals of improving
financial performance and patient outcomes.
“The goal is to turn data into information, and
information into insight.”
- Carly Fiorina, Former CEO of Hewlett Packard
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4. 3 Reasons To Dig Deeper into Your Hospital’s OR Data
1: BOOST FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE
Hospital Executives
As business, finance, and technology leaders, you play a critical role in meeting the
seemingly insurmountable challenges of delivering quality healthcare, controlling
costs, and maximizing margins.
While roles may differ, hospital executives face similar financial pain points caused
by the surgery department’s struggle to manage resources effectively in order to
reduce certain costs, capture all charges, and receive accurate reimbursement.
Such as, difficulty:
• Analyzing cost-per-case, per procedure and per
surgeon, to make better service line decisions.
• Measuring and tracking key financial, patient care,
and quality metrics to meet reimbursement goals
related to outcomes-based payments like ValueBased Purchasing.
• Pinpointing and analyzing clinical metrics to help
your facility improve quality, which is imperative for
meeting regulatory and compliance requirements.
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5. 3 Reasons To Dig Deeper into Your Hospital’s OR Data
Why Dig Deeper into Your OR Data?
Your hospital’s perioperative operation generates multitudes of static data that,
when explored and converted into useable information, enables you to identify
trends and make better decisions about opportunities for improvements, such as:
• Generating near real-time reports
(i.e., staff overtime, procedure length,
cost of supplies and implants) that
help you improve cost containment
measures.
• Facilitating data-based materials and
resource cost discussions with staff,
anesthesiologists, and surgeons.
• Measuring quality indicators (i.e., SCIP)
to help your facility monitor standard of
care practices and patient outcomes.
• Supporting compliance with
documentation standards which can
help ensure billing is comprehensive,
accurate, and timely.
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6. 3 Reasons To Dig Deeper into Your Hospital’s OR Data
BOOST FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE
OR Leadership
As leaders of the surgical department, fostering a
streamlined perioperative process, starting and ending
cases on time, producing accurate compliance and
performance reports, and improving patient safety
are always top of mind. You may view the department
through a different lens than hospital executives; however, you
also suffer from financial pain points:
• Lengthy turnover times: Isolating the root causes that lead to
decreased case volumes and margin.
• Inefficient scheduling: Understanding average historical procedure
time and resource requirements to help maximize OR resource use,
prioritize block schedules for high-volume surgeons, reduce nursing
overtime costs, and improve staff and patient satisfaction.
• Tissue waste and high implant costs: Effectively managing tissue
inventory and implants to reduce waste and costs while improving
OR throughput.
• High materials costs: Analyzing supply costs to renegotiate with
vendors or standardize supplies.
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7. 3 Reasons To Dig Deeper into Your Hospital’s OR Data
Move Beyond Static Reports to Generate Greater Insights
Unlike static reports, perioperative-specific analytics
tools allow you to visually drill down into your surgery
department’s data to a granular level and quickly
uncover knowledge. Beyond the simple, and often
delayed, facts and stats in a traditional report,
analytics tools can “think” like you think, providing
timely, insightful information that can help you make
better decisions that can promote a healthier bottom
line, such as:
• Understanding room utilization percentages by hour of day, and
sharing that information with surgeons so they can release unused
block time, which can improve OR utilization and allow for more
cases, as well as add-on cases, to be scheduled.
• Analyzing case volume, procedure, and surgeon time trends to
better schedule nursing staff to meet caseload demands, thereby,
reducing overtime.
• Pinpointing the root causes for case start delays, including timely
and actionable turnover-time data, to help increase case volumes.
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• Performing comparative analysis of average supply costs across
services/surgeons to help standardize and reduce the cost
of materials.
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8. 3 Reasons To Dig Deeper into Your Hospital’s OR Data
2: INCREASE OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY
OR Leadership
A well-oiled perioperative process is critical to the success of any OR. Without
near real-time data on patient milestones, procedure status, and block utilization,
bottlenecks are created, resulting in a chain reaction that diminishes the
performance of your OR. Like many OR managers, the following pain points
may contribute to inefficient processes:
• Late first-case start times, which can
delay the entire surgical schedule,
frustrate staff and patients, and
contribute to reduced case volume.
• Lack of availability on the schedule for
surgeon blocks or new/add on cases.
• Inefficient room turnover time and slow
patient throughput.
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9. 3 Reasons To Dig Deeper into Your Hospital’s OR Data
Remove the Bottleneck
Perioperative analytics can help relieve these pain points by
giving you access to key performance indicators, like block
utilization, turnover time, and OR capacity. In addition,
analytics can remove barriers to the data (i.e., additional
programming or assistance from IT staff) and displays your
OR performance measures in an easy-to-interpret format
with interactive graphs and tables. This makes reviewing
the information and implementing process improvements in
the OR much easier, such as being able to:
• Document and monitor the causes behind late first case starts in
order to proactively identify areas for improvement.
• Analyzing historical block utilization percentages by surgeon in a
given time frame to more effectively assign block schedules and
increase OR utilization.
• Tracking key performance indicators (i.e., room turnover time) via
up-to-the-minute notifications displayed on electronic communication
boards to help ensure patients are moving efficiently through the
perioperative process.
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10. 3 Reasons To Dig Deeper into Your Hospital’s OR Data
3: IMPROVE QUALITY & PATIENT OUTCOMES
OR and Anesthesia Leadership
It’s a well-known fact that complications after surgery can result in patients
experiencing a diminished quality of health, lengthier hospital stays, readmissions,
increased healthcare fees, and mortality. To help improve the quality of care,
surgical teams, including anesthesia providers, are required to document, track
and report on clinical quality measures (i.e., Surgical Care Improvement Project)
throughout the perioperative care process to help reduce the incidence of
postoperative complications.
A 2009 Annals of Surgery study shows that each hospital participating
in ACS NSQIP on average prevents 250-500 complications, saves
12-36 lives, and reduces costs by millions of dollars per year.*
*Does surgical quality improve in the American College
of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement
Program: an evaluation of all participating hospitals.,
Annals of Surgery, September 2009
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11. 3 Reasons To Dig Deeper into Your Hospital’s OR Data
While it’s imperative for surgical care teams to comply with these regulatory
guidelines in order to receive reimbursements, more importantly, improving the
quality of care and patient safety is the driving force behind these guidelines.
Unfortunately, given the manual process of tracking these specific quality measures,
you may be experiencing pain points that prevent you from accurately documenting
and reporting on these measures, such as:
• Inability to electronically track standard of care
compliance, such as antibiotic administration
during Preop and Postop.
• Inability to pinpoint and analyze clinical metrics
for improvement, which can lead to reduced
CMS payments.
• Difficulty tracking and reporting core quality
measures and developing strategies for
improvement.
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12. 3 Reasons To Dig Deeper into Your Hospital’s OR Data
Reporting Made Easy
As pressure mounts from the federal government,
regulatory agencies, and payers to tie hospital
reimbursements to quality of care rather than
volume of services, analyzing your OR’s
clinical metrics has become an essential task.
Perioperative analytics tools can enable you to
not only report on quality measures, but also plan and
implement strategies for improving
patient safety and quality of care. For example:
• Tracking administration of prophylactic antibiotics to help
ensure they are given at the standard time frames set forth by SCIP
guidelines.
• Documenting selected quality measures (i.e., percent of surgery
patients who’ve stopped receiving antibiotics within 24 hours of
surgery) to help ensure improvement points are given for Value Based
Purchasing incentive payments.
• Measuring quality indicators (i.e., number of hypothermic patients)
to help your facility monitor patient outcomes.
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13. 3 Reasons To Dig Deeper into Your Hospital’s OR Data
YOU CAN’T MANAGE WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE
As the federal government and other payers shift from their traditional roots of
fee-for-service to pay-for-performance/quality of care, relying on static numbers in
a report based on weeks or months-old data to manage performance is not going
to foster a thriving perioperative department. Business discovery tools that enable
proper analysis for improved decision making are essential. Surgery departments
must adopt more effective strategies to:
• Improve financial performance by understanding and controlling
resource costs, reducing waste, and delivering high-quality care to
generate accurate reimbursement.
• Enhance operational efficiency by identifying root causes of
productivity issues and putting improvement plans into place to
mitigate those issues.
• Help improve quality compliance and patient safety by properly
documenting and reporting on quality measures.
Not only does analytics provide you with the near-real-time information you
need, the insights you can glean by digging deeper into your perioperative data
can enable you to turn static digits into intelligence and make better and more
informed decisions.
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14. 10 Unproductive Practices You Should STOP in Periop || 14
Want to learn more about SIS Analytics? Hear Amy Smith, Director
of Perioperative Services at Robert Wood Johnson University
Hospital talk about how SIS Analytics has helped to increase OR
utilization by 70%, decrease overtime costs by $563,000, and
improved first case on-time starts to 85%.
To learn more about the AIMS from Surgical Information Systems,
call us at 1.800.930.089 or visit www.SISFirst.com.
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