Short of bringing an accountant into the operating room, hospitals don't have many options for easily and accurately determining OR revenues and cost consumption.
Picis, Inc., a Wakefield, Mass.-based provider of software systems for acute care areas of the hospital, hopes to make the process easier with Picis Perioperative Dashboard, a business activity monitoring solution designed to allow a hospital's OR to better manage its operations and finances. The real-time dashboard provides a snapshot of the surgical department, including case delays, cancellations, quality improvement compliance, patient throughput, documentation status and billing readiness, among other key indicators.
According to Picis officials, a hospital's perioperative department is rooted in unpredictability, forced to deal on a daily basis with emergencies, delayed or cancelled cases and add-ons that affect the department's workflow and resources. As a result, patient and staff schedules are often revised and rooms and resources are juggled, all of which affect productivity, clinician and patient satisfaction and finances.
"Managing the moving parts of a perioperative department is like air traffic control - keeping surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists and administrators up to date with OR status is challenging," said Leslie P. Shaff, MD, chief surgical services officer at the Lahey Clinic and Medical Center in Burlington, Mass., in a press release distributed by Picis. "Using Picis Perioperative Dashboard, we can keep every member of the team on the same page and address workflow issues before they impact care or delivery."
"Business intelligence and clinical analytics are among healthcare's next major challenges. Dashboards that highlight important 'here and now' indicators relevant to front line clinical champions and service line managers allow hospitals to gain more value from transactional systems by understanding process breakdowns and acting more quickly to address them," added Vi Shaffer, vice president of Gartner, Inc., a technology research and advisory company.
Using a customizable Web page that can be displayed on PCs, flat screens around the OR or other displays, Picis Perioperative Dashboard targets four impact areas of the OR:
• Scheduling and delays - The dashboard displays caseloads by room, surgeon, case or patient type, notifying administrators of day-of-booking and intraoperative cancellations and allowing them to track rooms that are running late or ahead of schedule. This enables them to reschedule procedures, switch rooms and notify clinicians and patients on a timely basis.
• Throuput - Potential PACU capacity issues are tracked and anticipated before bottlenecks occur.
• Metrics - Clinical processes and OR protocols are tracked and documented, allowing administrators to analyze how the OR processes comply with Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP) recommendations.
• Billing readiness - The dashboard tracks nursing documentation, allowing administrators to keep track of the billing process and search for any missing information. In addition, indicators can track supply issues and warn clinicians and administrators of cases that need attention.
Picis officials say Perioperative Dashboard includes a library of 17 indicators, along with five customizable models to allow hospitals to design their own indicators. The product is available to hospitals using the Picis Total Perioperative Automation Solution - OR Manager, SmarTrack, Preop Manager, Anesthesia Manager and PACU Manager.
"Based on feedback from a variety of perioperative stakeholders, we designed Picis Perioperative Dashboard to help hospitals improve the aspects that are most critical to their department - efficiency, patient care, quality improvement and patient and clinician satisfaction," said Marianne Slight, senior director of Analytics and Decision Support Products at Picis.