Take back control of your operating room, the financial heart of your organization, by leveraging data and analytics to maximize performance.
How can you actually like manage block time? If the reports youre using to hold a surgeon accountable arent trustworthy from the surgeon perspective, and theres a whole layer of nuance associated with every single one of these reports. It was at the point where we were managing who we were to get block time, and then just kind of decompressing appropriately.
But when I came into Surgical Directions, the reality is, the amount of time it takes to create those reports manually is arduous. So to do this over and over again was just– it was just painful. Then we got into Merlin and to have this at your fingertips. So I can just go into a portal and just drop down on a surgeon, and have these conversations in person, and say, hey, the reason your utilization was this is because on this day that you worked, you only did two cases. Or on this day, you didnt release your block.
And then them going into their calendar and pulling up their outlook calendar, and say, oh, youre right. But as soon as they saw that we had this level of granularity, we had this level of detail, I could tell you on this day, whether or not you were here or there, how many cases you did, how many surgical minutes you performed. I mean, the paradigm was, well, now we know someones watching. And I would say the Hawthorne effect took into effect.
But then it was like, how do you maintain it? How do you make sure that you honored them on a regular basis? And then thats when it goes back to now that we have that Hawthorne effect, itll go by the wayside if youre not showing them that data on a regular basis. So then now, I love the fact that were getting to where– how do we automate those reports? Just push them out right to the hospital, right to the surgeon. They have accountability to what is such a precious resource OR time. And I think the hospitals need to realize that is their precious resource.
Every hospital has the same basic data requirements for them to build. They need a surgery in time. They need a patient cut time. They need a close time. They need a patient out time. Those four timestamps along with the data surgery, the wheels in time, the OR– I mean, just those elements. We know each hospital has to have these elements for their respective billing– the surgeon, the surgical procedure, so on and so forth.
So weve been able to backfill. Weve been able to just create our own, I guess, algorithms based on that. We give all these discrete elements like their own unique address in our data world. And then from there, were able to create these unique metrics that, honestly, no other hospital can, because theyre not looking at the data with a sophistication that we are in terms of what is crucial to make a decision.
Theres all these different cuts of data that we need to see for us to say, heres what you need to make a decision on. But I think, usually, you kind of default to the data team at the hospital, and theyre only going to give you what they can provide as opposed to what they should provide and to make the OR run better. Having a Merlin at my fingertips is so powerful. Being able to flip through block utilization, heat maps, add-on time, I mean, the story I can tell in minutes.
