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Focused Factories - November 2015 - Outpatient Surgery Magazine

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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Because of that, we formed a multidisciplinary team to find a way to lower the cost of care while improving quality and outcomes. Less Van Gogh, more Henry Ford That's when we started looking at a care model that takes a little less from Van Gogh and a little more from Henry Ford. While most health- care organizations use a "solution shop" model to treat patients based on an individual provider's decisions, a "focused factory" approach relies on standard care pathways to treat a specific condition, special- ty or procedure, ultimately improving efficiency and reducing unwar- ranted variation. The focused factory idea originally came from the Harvard Business School, when economists discovered that U.S. companies offering a narrow selection of products or services were more competitive with their international counterparts. The same idea is applicable whether you're a hospital or a company making widgets — if you focus on pro- ducing a limited number of high-quality products or services, your costs decrease, your internal service lines don't compete for resources and your overall workflow improves. In surgery, here's how it works: The facility creates a pathway that dictates each major step in a patient's care for a specific specialty or procedure. All patients that meet a certain set of criteria — which can include factors like BMI, surgical complexity and comorbidities — are treated using this pathway. These defined treatment protocols control the important aspects of the patient's perioperative experience, including case scheduling, pre-op instructions, medications, surgical tools, anesthesia, post-op ambulation, diet, discharge and more. If a patient continues to meet the criteria, it triggers a domino effect where each staffer or physician defaults to the next step of treatment as defined in the pathway. 4 9 N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 5 | O U T P A T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T

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