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Proactively manage the OR to meet patient & doctor needs.

I think the most important thing is helping an organization reprioritize their OR to their patient and surgeon needs. Take a step back to proactively think, How should we manage the OR, how should our access be so that it aligns better with our patient population our surgeon access. And then be able to come back after the fact and say, Look what we did? When I see that that means a lot. When I see that our wasted minutes are reduced so that our utilization as a whole a bigger portion of it is tied to what I would call value based time, which is surgery.

Where I found the best performance or outcomes is the organizations that are actually thoughtful enough about how precious their OR time is and really being judicious about how they allocate it. So that way theyre being thoughtful– and this is important to meet the mission of the organization. When I hear that we need to do x, y, and z because we want to make sure our patients can get in December so they dont have to deal with that high copay in January, thats meaningful. And that I care about.

So when you start peeling back the layers and youre actually doing this. So you can actually improve production and access not just the surgeon but the patients. So when youre able to pull that away through data and decision making and proactive management of your OR, now youre doing stuff for the greater good and in that world its hard to argue. But you need to actually have that data and the governance to support it.

Author

  • Brian Watha

    Brian is the Senior Managing Director of Business Lines at Surgical Directions. He has extensive experience in OR process improvement, business intelligence and quaternary medical center perioperative services, where he has been responsible for all end-to-end OR processes as the Principal Management Engineer.

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At Surgical Directions, We Offer a Variety of Perioperative Optimization Services.

Brian Watha

Brian is the Senior Managing Director of Business Lines at Surgical Directions. He has extensive experience in OR process improvement, business intelligence and quaternary medical center perioperative services, where he has been responsible for all end-to-end OR processes as the Principal Management Engineer.