Like air traffic control, juggling operating room schedules at jammed hospitals is an often chaotic process in which a few planning missteps or lost opportunities can lead to a ripple effect of inefficiencies. It’s why the GE Healthcare Performance Solutions team partnered with Moffitt Cancer Center — a top 20 center located in Tampa, Fla. — to combine GE’s innovative technology with its Lean management processes to help Moffitt dramatically expand its patient capacity. In just eight months, the center expanded to handle an additional 900 procedures per year, slashed overtime costs by one-third, and boosted its on-time scheduling rate to 72 percent. As Jeff Terry, Managing Principal of Clinical Excellence for GE Healthcare says in the video below, the key component of Moffitt’s success story is a technology called Block Optimizer, which was developed by scientists at GE’s Global Research Center in collaboration with Yale.Like air traffic control, juggling operating room schedules at jammed hospitals is an often chaotic process in which a few planning missteps or lost opportunities can lead to a ripple effect of inefficiencies. It’s why the GE Healthcare Performance Solutions team partnered with Moffitt Cancer Center — a top 20 center located in Tampa, Fla. — to combine GE’s innovative technology with its Lean management processes to help Moffitt dramatically expand its patient capacity. In just eight months, the center expanded to handle an additional 900 procedures per year, slashed overtime costs by one-third, and boosted its on-time scheduling rate to 72 percent. As Jeff Terry, Managing Principal of Clinical Excellence for GE Healthcare says in the video below, the key component of Moffitt’s success story is a technology called Block Optimizer, which was developed by scientists at GE’s Global Research Center in collaboration with Yale.
“The way operating rooms are set up is that time is allocated to surgeons in chunks — two-hour chunks, four-hour chunks — and they organize their cases and procedures in that time,” Jeff says. “But organizing that schedule turns out to be an enormously sophisticated problem.”
To illustrate, he compares the operating room logjam to the problems airlines face in scheduling landings and take-offs — and to the dilemma pro baseball faces every season: “Major League Baseball has 32 teams, each play 162 games, home and away, inter-league, they have to balance use of stadiums around concerts, monster truck pulls and everything else. And of course, ESPN wants the Yankees and the Red Sox on Sunday night and other high value games. Just imagine sitting down and trying to design that schedule. It’s virtually impossible…. In a typical U.S. hospital, if they have more than about 12 operating rooms, it’s a more complex scheduling problem for that hospital than it is for Major League Baseball…. The Block Optimizer actually considers several dozen constraints to build the optimal schedule” and goes through “several hundred thousand iterations” to find the best way to allocate time to surgeons, he says.
One of the key benefits of the technology, which was used in conjunction with GE’s Lean performance improvement techniques, is that hospitals can more efficiently use existing capacity rather than incur the gigantic costs of building new operating rooms. Freeing up capacity at Moffitt will enable a 12 percent increase in procedural volume — which dovetails with GE’s healthymagination strategy to reduce costs, improve access and increase quality in healthcare. The increased volume means Moffitt is on track to gain more than 3,000 additional hours of applied operating room time and $8 million in incremental direct margin within the first year.
And by redesigning its operational processes, Moffitt raised its first-case on-time starts from 13 percent to a whopping 72 percent in just a few months.
In 2009, Moffitt was named by U.S. News & World Report as one of the best hospitals for the treatment of cancer, the 11th consecutive year it has achieved that recognition. More than 16,000 patients are treated at Moffitt each year and approximately 8,400 surgical procedures performed.
* Read today’s announcement
* Read “Hey, good looking! GE’s medical designs win 5 awards”
* Learn about GE’s healthymagination strategy on cost, quality and access
* Read about GE’s work with clinics in India
* Read about GE’s donation of neonatal equipment in the U.K.
* Read GE Reports’ coverage of the healthymagination launch
* Read about GE’s Electronic Medical Records technology
* Read GE Reports’ story about our Health Advisory Board
* Read about healthymagination’s work with electronic medical records
* Read about our healthymagination work in Bangladesh
* Learn more about the partnership with Grameen Healthcare Trust
* Learn about our work in Cambodia
* Read our story about GE’s localized healthcare technology breakthroughs going global
