IMPROVING OPERATING ROOM EFFICIENCY AND THE ROLE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
Five Ways Digital Technology Can Improve Operating Room Productivity and Efficiency Barco Businesses worldwide have embraced digital transformation. In the past decade, many organizations have ramped up their digital efforts in order to overhaul their business processes and improve the customer experience. The same can be said of the operating room (OR). As in other industries, the OR has not introduced digitization for digitization’s sake, but rather to reduce complexity, simplify workflows, and increase efficiency and productivity of the OR staff. Beneluxpark 21, 8500 Kortrijk Belgium +32 56 233211 info@barco.com www.barco.com
Technology has always been a driver of productivity and efficiency. But can digital technology also make this happen in the OR? First and foremost, let’s define what efficiency and productivity means for the OR. •E fficiency is about improving patient satisfaction and reducing errors or postoperative complications. •P roductivity relates to treating the maximum number of patients in order to increase hospital revenues. In many hospitals, surgical and interventional services already contribute to more than half of the hospital’s revenue, and this rate is going upi. Barco, a worldwide leader in visualization technology, has been supporting surgeons and OR staff to improve operating efficiency and to simplify workflows for several decades. In this article we’ll talk about five ways in which digital solutions can improve surgical teams’ productivity and efficiency, from OR preparation to patient turnover.
1. Reducing Setup and Preparation Time Among other things, the productivity of surgical teams and the efficient use of the OR depends on easy and flexible scheduling of cases and on the time required for their preparation
and technology setup. However, by bringing more technology into the OR, the setup and configuration before surgeries have become increasingly complex and time-consuming. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to prevent case start delays, cancellations and long patient waiting lists. Setting up the OR environment for a new patient should be simple and straightforward. A technology like IP-based video integration for the operating room, also called “OR-over-IP”, can reduce complexity in the operating room and reduce the preparation time. By offering a standard architecture, the OR-over-IP approach simplifies installation and reduces set-up time in the OR. Barco’s Nexxis OR-over-IP platform makes it possible to share uncompressed, high-resolution video (and audio) in and between operating rooms. This technology has been specifically designed for integration into the digital OR. With Nexxis, adding new devices or switching sources works on a plug and play basis, and images can be displayed on any OR display connected through the network. To reduce clutter and complexity even more, all imaging sources can be brought together in the interventional control room on a single display, managed by a single keyboard and mouse.
Among other things, the productivity of surgical teams and the efficient use of the OR depends on easy and flexible scheduling of cases and on the time required for their preparation and technology setup
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