Surgical Services is one of the highest margin areas for most hospitals. Yet, despite its importance and high costs, the methods and tools available to manage OR capacity have not kept pace with evolving needs and technologies.
Forecasting provides leadership at all levels with a tool that helps them make proactive decisions early enough to meaningfully improve OR throughput.
The objective of reliable surgical services forecasting is to create an accurate estimate of future demands on procedural areas. An accurate forecast should start from the beginning of a surgical patient’s experience. It should model surgeons’ clinic schedules, conversion rates, and surgeons’ individual scheduling practices. Then it should factor in attributes of individual sites that influence activities on the day of surgery, such as add-ons, emergencies, and cancellations. When this information is blended with budgets and block schedules and updated daily, it becomes a transformational tool.
A Crystal Ball for Surgical Services
This forecast empowers Surgical Services leadership with a clear picture of surgical volumes, prime time utilization rates, and budget performance weeks, even months ahead of scheduled surgeries — enabling them to make adjustments with information that has not been available to them before. These include:
Improve OR Capacity by Identifying “White Spaces” in Future Schedules. Allocation of block time is an age-old challenge for surgical services. Traditionally, ORs have used automated and surgeon-initiated block releases to reclaim time that would not be used with limited success. Access to accurate, evidence-based forecasting months ahead of day-of-surgery offers the ability to reallocate future OR times to physicians who have demonstrated need for OR time.
Reduce OT and Clinician Fatigue by Right-Sizing Staffing Weeks to Months Ahead. Leadership makes staffing decisions and creates related staff schedules weeks ahead. When the plan does not match the demand on the day of surgery, adjustments either cause increased costs in overtime or decreased staff, physician, and patient satisfaction. With accurate forecasts, leadership can make staffing plans that will match the exact demand for the specific day.
Manage Surgical Services Proactively by Visualizing the Surgical Pipeline. In general, Surgical Services leadership specifically and Hospital leadership has little or segmented visibility to an individual surgeons’ potential number of future surgeries. A forecast that brings surgeon clinic and hospital data elements together helps leadership with resource allocation decisions, service lines to focus on, or even identify areas to hire additional providers.
When done right, surgical services forecasting can be a paradigm-changing tool in hospital management, changing it from reactive to proactive. The three benefits described above only begin to scratch the surface of the many possibilities made possible by reliable surgical services forecasting.