Outpatient Surgery Magazine

OR Excellence Session Previews - June 2015

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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5 2 S U P P L E M E N T T O O U T P A T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E J U N E 2 0 1 5 and maybe even physicians whose cases you're trying to recruit to the commu- nity for which you're marketing your quality of care and patient safety. • From accounting to addiction. I fell into my benchmarking habit by accident. When I began managing this center, its leaders wanted to see daily data and kept a tighter rein until certain criteria were met. This practice taught me a lot about being able to recognize problems at a glance, and implement changes and cor- rections when I did. When I was looking at that data every day, I realized, this is really good information to have and analyze. And it's at my fingertips, in spread- sheet form, which I can sort in any number of ways. • Different data serves different purposes. Not every administrator will find value in benchmarking the same metrics. Some facilities will benefit more from a close eye on collections and billing data, others from outliers in patient safety and hospital transfers. Since things that get measured get improved, however, it's most important to look at things that are important to you and your customers. • Cold hard facts. It was particularly gratifying, when I heard a physician grousing between cases about how long our OR turnover times were, to be able to pull up data showing that his team worked really hard to average a stellar 6 minutes for him. And our nurses were hugely satisfied when a data collection project examining how often patients arrived in the OR missing certain pre-op prepara- tions — BP cuffs, EKG leads, etc. — confirmed that there was a problem, which could then be addressed. • Knowledge is power. I think benchmarking can be overwhelming, especially if you're not a numbers person. I'd like to take the mystery and fear out of the process. If you pull numbers over the long term, you can see what's making a difference. If you can enter numbers into a spreadsheet, you can track a trend or set a benchmark to hit. It really doesn't have to be scary, and sharing and

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