CommonSpirit Health Gains Huge Efficiencies with AI-Infused OR Scheduling Tool

The massive national health system garnered a 14.5 times ROI in the technology not to mention happier surgeons. With this many hospitals, it can be difficult to implement technology across the entire system that employees will actually warm to, said Brian Dawson, system vice president of perioperative services at CommonSpirit Health. The "Rock the block" process would start with nurses at certain hospitals looking through each individual OR schedule to find openings and emailing those openings to surgeons in hopes they would claim the time and the OR would not go unused. "From that point, I knew we needed to invest in a solution that would ease this scheduling burden while also continuing the great utilization work that already had been started by the dedicated folks within the hospital." "I knew that using artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions, the point of iQueue was to solve for empty ORs and match with surgeons looking for block time," he explained. "iQueue works by prompting surgeons to release unused time, in part by suggesting release dates timed to maximize prospects for filling as many of those unused staff operating rooms as possible," he continued.

Dawson met with the vendor and discovered one of CommonSpirit Health's Bay Area hospitals already had reached out to their team about onboarding the technology. "With those proof points, I was able to return back to our team leadership and work with them to discuss what adopting iQueue would look like," Dawson said. Once Dawson and company deployed the OR tool, administrators, surgeons, OR nurses and the IT department saw improvements with OR time, managing block time, using common metrics and block policies. "iQueue took the manual work out of the process while still combing schedules, flagging unutilized OR block time, pushing notifications on availability to surgeons, and more. This is an extremely strong indicator of what the technology is providing us – filling unused OR time, bringing new surgeons into our hospitals, and taking volume away from our competitors." "With released blocks, our marketing team is able to go out to surgeons who don't operate within our hospitals and weigh their options – sort of a 'We can give you something better.' "As a result, we've seen a 153% increase in staffed OR blocks released by surgeons, to drive the higher utilization." "It not only will return your investment, it will cut down on staff burnout, bring new surgeons to your hospitals and improve overall systemness within the health system. There are a number of hospitals within the health system in small rural areas that have less than four rooms and might have five surgeons.