Case Study - Surgical Services Operational Excellence
Executive Summary
A large hospital identified the need to improve their surgical services operations. They wished to analyze all areas of their surgical services for any efficiency gains and potential cost savings. An initial scoping found opportunities in scheduling, pre-admissions, day-of-surgery, and central processing. It was the hope of this hospital to fully analyze the current state and develop a roadmap for improvements across all of surgical services to provide a high quality of care for their patients while decreasing costs and increasing capacity and in turn revenue.
Challenge
The hospital wished to identify key improvement opportunities across their entire Surgical Services department in order to maximize efficiency gains, improve the patient experience, and ultimately yield expanded capacity as well as to create a roadmap to implementing these recommendations.
Strategy/Approach
Tefen worked closely with this hospital to structure the project so as to meet their unique needs. During the course of the project scoping five separate workstreams were proposed, these workstreams were verified at the outset of the diagnostic with client resources. Minor modifications were made to the workstream's goals and deliverables as they were decided to best benefit the project.
Activities included in the diagnostic were:
- Process Maps for all key processes within each workstream
- Metric creation to evaluate current performance
- Time study analysis
- Case volume analysis
- Staffing level analysis
- Cross functional team reviews of recommendations
Results/Achievement
At the completion of the diagnostic Tefen had fully analyzed all aspects of each of the selected workstreams for improvement opportunities, worked with client resources to rank order by priority each recommendation, and created a fully integrated department-wide implementation road map.
