Operating Room Patient Safety and Efficiency Transform From Challenge To Opportunity

Operating Room Patient Safety and Efficiency Transform From Challenge To Opportunity St. Vincent’s Hospital, the oldest hospital in Birmingham, Ala., is a not-for-profit hospital that has been dedicated to the betterment of health in Birmingham for more than a century. With cost pressures rising, the hospital recognized that it had to increase its profit margins to maintain financial stability and continue to ensure operating room patient safety.

Specific hurdles St. Vincent's surgical services team needed to clear to achieve these goals included eliminating the bottlenecks and delays in surgery that inconvenienced patients. Additionally, despite possessing a safety record that was in the upper percentile, St. Vincent's lacked a formal process to ensure medication and wrong-site surgery errors did not occur.

For a solution, the team selected and implemented McKesson’s Pathways Healthcare Scheduling™, Horizon Surgical Manager™, Horizon Expert Documentation™ and Horizon Business Insight™.

Combined, these solutions formed an unbroken continuum of patient care technology that stretched from scheduling, through the operating room, to the recovery room.

St. Vincent’s use of integrated technology solutions helped the hospital transform its challenges into opportunities. By optimizing scheduling efficiency and OR utilization, St. Vincent’s was able to boost its surgical case load from 60 to 80 cases per day without adding capacity. St. Vincent’s also increased the total number of annual surgeries from 13,216 to 15,225 in three years — a 15 percent throughput improvement.

In regards to patient safety, no incidents of wrong site surgery - an extremely uncommon occurrence, beforehand - have been reported at St. Vincent's since the McKesson systems went live.

Staff at St. Vincent's credit its success in improving efficiency and operating room patient safety to the performance of a highly trained and well-qualified staff of clinicians who were able to take full advantage of McKesson’s integrated technology solutions and support services.

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