To stay competitive all hospitals need to feed their most important revenue creator, the surgery operating room. Anytime the OR is in use, the hospital is making money and the opposite is true as well. In the medical industry a commonly used performance metric is first case on-time starts for surgery. The benchmark for the industry is around 75% on-time starts. Historically, this hospital has performed stagnantly in the 40% - 50% range which is unacceptable from any perspective. This hospital needed cost effective solutions to improve their on-time start for surgery performance.

IET developed a process record that visually represented the elements required by each key resource for scheduling surgery. Using this visual tool, a streamlined standardized process was developed for implementation. The initiatives set in motion focused on quality improvements, customer satisfaction and cost reduction. By eliminating variance in the process, the results could be measured and therefore better managed towards continuous improvement.

Along with process improvement, individual performance of a specific key resource needed to be improved. This was handled by creating an incentive based system that rewards the high performing operators and essentially removes the low performing operators from contributing at all to the on-time start metric.

IET’s process improvements will improve the surgery on-time start performance from 45% to 90% within the span of 3 months from the start of implementation. The result will be lower operating costs, ability to perform 20% more surgeries, higher OR room utilization, larger profit margins, improved morale among the hospital staff and ultimately a more satisfied customer.