with manual techniques, so be sure enough of your physicians will
use the technology often enough to justify adding it.
If you can check off those 3 boxes — space, economic sense and
surgeon buy-in — a femto is likely to be a good deal for your facility.
• Patient flow. We're able to get away with fairly small pre- and
post-op bays, and use that valuable square footage in other areas of
the facility, in part because we don't ask patients to change their
clothes for surgery. But be aware that different states have different
regulations with respect to whether or not patients can wear street
clothes into the OR. Depending on yours, you might have to allow for
more space in pre- and post-op areas.
Not having to change cataract patients into surgical gowns for sur-
gery improves perioperative efficiencies. We've also boosted efficien-
cy by investing in patient monitors that ride on the foot of the bed.
The monitors are then mounted onto the table, so we connect them in
pre-op and they ride with the patient all the way through the surgical
experience. That means we don't have to waste time hassling with dis-
connecting and reconnecting them multiple times as patients travel
from pre-op, to the OR, to post-op.
• Convenient workspaces. Outside the OR, think about where the
anesthesia office, supply storage area and medication room will be in
relation to the flow and efficiency of your facility. Also, where is your
leadership going to sit? All our clinical managers are expected to pitch
in and help, so it's important to have them centrally located and easily
accessible.
Expert advice
Here at the Cincinnati Eye Institute, we've been expanding. In addi-
tion to our main facility, where we do almost 14,000 ophthalmic surgi-
2 8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • M A R C H 2 0 1 8