Success Stories

Dignity Health Increased OR Block Release by 153%

9% Increase in staffed room utilization

153% Increase in blocks released

21% Fill rate of released blocks

14.5x ROI

Summary

Serving patients in Arizona, California, and Nevada, Dignity Health is a nonprofit network of more than 40 acute care hospitals, and 400-plus care centers, in Arizona, California, and Nevada. Collectively, the Dignity Health network includes more than 250 operating rooms. Dignity Health joined together with Catholic Health Initiatives in early 2019 to create a new nonprofit Catholic health system dedicated to serving the common good, CommonSpirit Health.

Profile

Tri-state health system

40 acute care hospitals

250+ ORs

400+ care centers

Problem

Dignity Health Perioperative Services found that its traditional block management methods for surgical schedules resulted in a lack of foresight into which block time would ultimately go unused, limiting OR access. Block utilization as a metric also proved one dimensional and produced low accountability for block owners. Dignity Health also relied on a time-consuming manual release process dependent on each physician office. Valuable information was thus buried in hundreds of reports that were time consuming to produce and consume, and OR time went unused, impacting surgeon satisfaction, patient access, and hospital ROI. Dignity Health leadership needed a predictive, prescriptive approach to analyzing and increasing OR utilization.

Solution

Dignity Health partnered with LeanTaaS to deploy iQueue for Operating Rooms across its 250+ ORs, system-wide, with parent organization CommonSpirit Health facilitating the process and OR users operationalizing the tools. The three modules of iQueue deployed at the time – Analyze, Collect, and Exchange – in turn promoted three key pillars to improve OR performance and efficiency. These included universal visibility of OR time usage and analytics, accountability for block usage by helpful metrics, and accessibility of truly usable block time.

Through iQueue, Dignity Health received actionable, personalized insights that advanced the timely delivery of quality patient care. These insights enabled them to achieve impressive results.

We’ve increased our volume, we’ve increased our prime time utilization, we’ve increased our staffed room, we’ve increased our block utilization, and we’ve generated in the first 18 months of the tool … $40 million.

Brian Dawson

System Vice President of Perioperative Services, CommonSpirit Health