Dr. Jasleen Saluja
Lead - Clinical Solutions
(Author)
Dr. Amar Jain
VP - Clinical Solutions
(Co-Author)
Surgery is a substantial driver of revenue for hospitals. An estimated 50 million inpatient surgical procedures occur each year in the United States, costing $175 billion. Given these striking numbers and the fact that over 40% of costs of the acute care episodes of surgical patients are related to the resource-intensive operating room, it is no surprise that the OR has become a locus of cost-containment initiatives for health systems. (Source: HBR)
Surgery scheduling is a constant juggling act that involves the entire clinical and operational personnel. Operating an OR has a substantial financial impact, therefore the surgical team is under considerable pressure to make the most of the healthcare facilities while maintaining the quality of patient care. Inefficient scheduling can cause significant overtime costs, costly idleness between surgical cases, and increased patient anxiety as a result of delays or surgical rescheduling (which is typically caused by a lack of communication between surgeons, patients, and schedulers around surgical plans, case times, and other resources that are deemed requisite to conduct surgical procedure).
Healthcare is full of hidden inefficiencies and within this lies the opportunity for technology. Digitizing the surgery coordination for surgical procedures will allow better management of surgeries booking requests from clinicians, optimize the planning process, and track procedure preparations to improve efficiency, reduce cancellations, and improve patient satisfaction. Such collaborations are essential for the efficient delivery of value-based health care.
How Minerva Perioperative Coordination Solution Can Help
The Perioperative Coordination solution has been designed to allow hospitals to digitize the entire journey from surgery requests to surgery completion. Thereby, enabling surgeons/proceduralists and surgery facilities to handle surgery scheduling requests, optimize the planning process, and follow procedure preparations to improve operational efficiency and prevent cancellations. At the same time, the patients could access surgical instructions, notifications, and reminders all from one place via mobile and web applications.
This next-generation web and mobile-based application empowers surgeons to make high-value care decisions to improve care quality and allows surgery centers/ ambulatory surgical centers to manage surgery/procedure booking request, optimize the planning process, and track procedure preparations.
The solution is powered by our Data PaaS, Minerva, which integrates seamlessly using industry standard HL7 messaging and APIs with different types of data sources such as inpatient EMRs, Ambulatory EMRs, legacy EMRs, and Data lakes, and more. We are the first product to be certified by both b (10) and g (10) ONC measures.
Five ways Minerva Perioperative Coordination Solution streamlines the Surgery Scheduling Process:
- Automated Surgery Planning and Coordination
- Personalized access to information for multi-disciplinary teams
- Interactive Dashboard to monitor surgery-related metrics
- Reduce Administrative load through Electronic Form generation
- Web Application for Surgeons and Scheduling team
Each healthcare organization has its system for scheduling. The traditional scheduling approach involves manual surgery scheduling through paper forms which is cumbersome for the surgeon and administrative staff. It is now necessary to replace the paper-based scheduling method with a digital one that enables the surgeon to monitor the flow of information from end to end. Electronic booking forms allow surgeons to digitally create all surgical information and share it with other surgical teams.
Numerous surgeries have been rescheduled or even cancelled because of missing patient information, incomplete documents. With so many teams involved, timely and clear communication can easily lead to oversights like forgetting to notify everyone of last-minute surgery cancellation. Personalized automated notifications and alerts ensure the Surgeon, Patient and operational team involved are up to date with all the information around the surgeries.
Due to its dispersion across several departments and compilation on various platforms and publications, the potential of today’s healthcare data is usually underutilized. With so many data points being analysed to handle the pre-surgery process, such as approvals and authorizations- it is understandable why procedures are postponed when crucial data is missing. By assigning a status to each surgical case and monitoring its progress with a prerequisite task, the Minerva dashboard streamlines the surgical workflow. The task replicates the workflow and shows every element needed to complete the surgical booking. All information is accessible on a single consolidated dashboard, thereby, enabling users to view outstanding tasks and surgeons to keep track of progress.
Manual filling of forms can easily result in errors. These errors not only cause frustration and potential delays in surgeries, but negatively impact patient care and quality. Tracking down the source of errors also generates an increased workload for the scheduling team, who will have to identify and resolve the errors. By using the Minerva electronic form generator, we can reduce the amount of paper used by up to 100%, which lowers the administrative effort associated with managing paper and extracting statistics by up to 30%.
Ensuring everyone who is deemed to be requisite to conduct a surgical procedure is available is a critical extension of scheduling and planning. It is well recognized that keeping surgeries as per the schedule increases operating room efficiency and eliminates unnecessary expenses. Some of the most common reasons for surgery delays are the unavailability of the surgeon or staff, a backlog in patient registration, and a lack of real-time information updates. With Minerva’s web application, the surgeon and scheduling team can book, plan and track surgeries and receive real-time updates about each surgery to minimize errors and delays caused by schedule changes.
The Future of Surgery Scheduling
The Minerva Perioperative Solution is the way forward — and that future is here. When looking for a surgery scheduling app, you must look for a robust, intuitive, yet a user-friendly solution. Contact us to learn more about how you can realize efficiencies by enabling you to digitize the end-to-end surgery coordination process.
