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 1 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5 | O U T P A T I E N T S U R G E R Y . N E T After the SCARS Center in Newport Beach, Calif., decided to track every cost associat- ed with every case, OR Manager Darren Burchartz, ST, and Medical Director Simon Madorsky, MD, hit a snag. Software designed for the job was pricey and would take weeks to properly train staff on. So they decided to design their own system. "We wanted to know the real cost of an operation," says Mr. Burchartz. "When we expanded from skin cancer treatment, facial reconstruction and ENT to higher-cost cases such as orthopedics, neuro spine and oculoplastics, we knew a system needed to be in place." The center uses Google Sheets — a free, cloud-based spreadsheet program — to track all case costs, including supplies, labor and equipment rental fees. To do this, Mr. Burchartz and Dr. Madorsky created 2 spreadsheets that make up the backbone of the system — a master sheet and a case charge template. Here's how it works. When a patient is scheduled for surgery, the front desk staff uses the template to create a case charge spreadsheet for that patient. This sheet lists supplies, costs and hours used in the OR. The center's master document has a link for each of these patient's case cost sheets. On the day of surgery, a nurse from the surgical team logs into the master document and enters the patient's name into the search bar. She then pulls up the patient's case charge sheet. After that, the nurse goes down the list of supplies and tal- lies how many of each are used in the case, as well as the number of staff working the OR. Hidden equations in the spreadsheet's cells add up costs for each item, as well as a total cost for the case. Mr. Burchartz can then review the document and scan in invoices for rental equipment S K I N C A N C E R & R E C O N S T R U C T I V E S U R G E R Y C E N T E R DIY Case-Costing System z FREE SHEETS The SCARS Center track case costs using the free Google Sheets program. SCARS Center