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Mon, Dec 07 2009 4:52 PM EST
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I started off this year’s National Forum on Quality Improvement Sunday afternoon listening to health care systems guru Eugene Litvak preach the gospel of managing variability in the operating room. Litvak, a professor of operations management at Boston University’s Health Policy Institute, argued that most hospitals have huge inefficiencies in scheduling surgeries that impact the bottom line, overload staff and even contribute to medical errors by over-stressing their systems.
By better separating scheduled and unscheduled procedures, Litvak said hospitals can handle more capacity in an orderly fashion without the need for huge capital expenditures to add capacity and beds. He cited Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for saving $137 million in operating costs and passing on a related $100 million expansion project by developing more rigorous scheduling processes and addressing organizational variability.
The chatter from the audience was that while better control over scheduling is desired, predicting and managing future capacity is trickier than it seems, something Litvak readily admitted. “It’s easier to predict when someone will break a leg than when an elective admission will take place,” Litvak said.
One person in attendance said the work of transforming a hospital’s scheduling system may take years, not months, and predicting the future, even with a plethora of evidence and past experience, is never straightforward.
Haydn Bush is quality resources specialist with AHA Quality Center, blogging live from IHI 2009.
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