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Managing operating rooms (ORs) is all about maintaining a delicate balance. Even the smallest misstep can have a big impact, not only on patient care but also on the hospital's bottom line.
This article will delve into essential strategies for reducing supply costs and optimizing resource utilization in operating rooms, which are fundamental to enhancing patient care and ensuring profitability.
A study published in BMC Health Services Research evaluated management policies for hospital operating rooms. The study highlights that ORs are major bottlenecks and key revenue drivers in hospitals, with a significant portion of hospital admissions due to surgeries.
However, the presence of inefficiencies and waste within ORs can undermine their role as financial catalysts, reducing the funds available for enhancing patient care across other services.
The American College of Surgeons recently conducted a comprehensive review of 23 studies involving 28 quality improvement initiatives that showed cost savings resulted from various sustainability approaches in the OR, such as reducing medical waste, incorporating energy-saving strategies, and using fewer materials and equipment.
Ineffective OR management can adversely affect the hospital in many ways, including:
So, embracing sustainability in our operating rooms can be a major plus for the hospital's finances. But the question is, where do we start? Let's dive into some effective strategies to reduce waste and enhance efficiency:
MEDHOST Perioperative Experience was conceived and designed with firsthand user experiences and feedback from advisory groups. We can help you focus on creating a seamless integration between materials management and your perioperative department.
To learn more, reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
Franklin, TN – September 13, 2023 – MEDHOST®, a leading healthcare technology solutions provider, is excited to announce a successful partnership with Blue Ridge Medical Center (previously known as Fannin Regional Hospital) in meeting the requirements for Rural Emergency Hospital (REH) designation.
The designation of Rural Emergency Hospital was established by Congress in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021. It is meant to create better access to outpatient medical services for people in rural communities who may not have access to full-service hospitals. As of January 2023, Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) and rural hospitals with 50 beds or fewer may apply for this designation and receive Medicare funds for the emergency services they provide.
Recently, MEDHOST launched its REH package with the goal of aiding rural hospitals like Blue Ridge Medical Center in maintaining operations and providing vital services to their communities despite financial challenges.
Effective July 2023, Blue Ridge Medical Center will make the shift to delivering 24/7 emergency medical services, patient observation, and select outpatient services under the new designation.
“By becoming a Rural Emergency Hospital, we’re taking a fresh approach to addressing the healthcare needs of our community,” said Bappa Mukherji, Chief Executive Officer at Blue Ridge Medical Center. “This model will help ensure that our patient population can access emergency and critical outpatient services while we stabilize the financial condition of the hospital.”
In 2022, Blue Ridge Medical Center, deeply concerned about mounting financial difficulties, turned to MEDHOST for a solution. The result was a tailored offering that combined application management, clinical informatics, and subject matter expertise with MEDHOST's suite of industry-leading solutions, including the REH Package, Perioperative Experience, and Anesthesia Experience.
“By outsourcing some of its workloads to MEDHOST’s MEDTEAM application management and revenue cycle services, hospitals can focus on critical aspects of their operations, such as laboratory, radiology, and pharmacy services,” said Bill Anderson, CEO at MEDHOST. “In the case of Blue Ridge Medical Center, MEDHOST provided support and resources to help it operate efficiently as an REH, allowing the hospital to remain open and continue serving its community.”
MEDHOST is dedicated to supporting rural hospitals and equipping them with the tools and resources needed for success. The REH package is just one way MEDHOST is fulfilling this mission.
The benefits of becoming an REH include a 5 percent premium to the standard Medicare Outpatient Prospective Payment System payment for covered services in addition to a monthly facility fee. The monthly facility fee is determined annually based on the average Critical Access Hospital reimbursement. Currently, the estimated facility fee is approximately $275,000 per month.
If you're wondering if your facility is eligible for conversion, it will need to meet certain requirements, including the following federal criteria: be a Critical Access Hospital (CAH) or a rural hospital with no more than 50 beds that was established and open on December 27, 2020, and have a transfer agreement with a level I or level II trauma center. Qualification is also subject to applicable state requirements.
MEDHOST's commitment to rural hospitals doesn't end here. Visit their website to learn more about how MEDHOST can assist in the REH transition process and the various ways they're helping rural hospitals like Blue Ridge Medical Center stay operational and serve their communities.
About MEDHOST
For over 35 years, MEDHOST has provided products and services to healthcare facilities of all types and sizes. Today, healthcare facilities nationwide partner with MEDHOST to enhance patient care and operational excellence with our clinical and financial solutions, including an integrated EHR solution. MEDHOST offers a comprehensive emergency department information system with business and reporting tools. Through unparalleled support and cloud platform solutions, we make it easy for healthcare facilities to focus on what's important: their patients and business. Connect with MEDHOST on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
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This often-overlooked department is a key contributor to patient safety and revenue. Like many hospital departments, however, Anesthesia and Surgery carry technological challenges that require research and creativity to overcome.
This post outlines the top 3 tech considerations for folding in anesthesia for a streamlined perioperative environment.
The unique needs of the perioperative environment demand a specifically designed system. It should focus first on patient safety, such as decision support and reminders to ensure compliance with reported indicators, and it should offer efficiencies, such as patient tracking and distributed knowledge.
Because enterprise hospital information systems (HIS) often lag in perioperative functionality, surgeons and anesthesiologists who seek best practices prefer best-of-breed anesthesia information management systems (AIMS) and/or perioperative information management systems (PIMS).
Perioperative systems have intrinsic design features to support safety. For example, decision support systems provide clinicians with time- or process-based reminders to perform specific tasks.
Such tasks might include the administration of pre-surgical antibiotics, ensuring complete documentation, providing a preoperative time-out checklist, or postoperative hand-off.
By integrating anesthesia into the entire perioperative workflow, instead of siloing, clinicians have access to vitals graphing, medication documentation, anesthesia charting, and orders, all within one application, which can help prevent errors and gaps in critical information at the time of care.
Surgical procedures are the greatest single center of cost and revenue for many hospitals. This is why it's critical to enhance the perioperative environment to decrease costs through improved efficiency and to increase revenue by improving the accuracy and timeliness of documentation.
Ideally, you'll want to invest in one Anesthesia and Surgery system that addresses all 3 of these needs.
Fully integrated with MEDHOST Perioperative Experience, MEDHOST Anesthesia Experience supports essential aspects of anesthesia care across the perioperative workflow.
Features include:
To learn more about how MEDHOST helps hospitals and their clinicians deliver patient-centered care, promote positive outcomes, and increase patient satisfaction, email inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
As a critical step in the surgical care process, anesthesia solutions should complement all other aspects of the patient-provider experience.
Without being fully integrated into an operating room’s (OR) perioperative platform, the anesthesia documentation process can create friction related to delays in time-sensitive communications and continuity of care.
In this blog, we discuss how a comprehensive perioperative application can remove obstacles to a collaborative environment that promotes surgeon satisfaction, improved patient outcomes, and accelerated OR throughput.
As a national EHR provider, MEDHOST helps healthcare systems of all sizes curate large amounts of clinical data used for tracking and documentation throughout the perioperative continuum.
After years of providing this service, an obvious, and somewhat universal pain point started to take shape: with so much information, it can be easy for stakeholders to find themselves set adrift mid-procedure on a sea of documentation and timestamps that don’t add up.
Taking these volumes of raw data and turning them into actionable insights that OR teams can use at the point of care requires intelligent, layered solutions.
Through the integration of smart healthcare technologies, all the necessary documentation of a patient’s journey, leading up to, during, and after a procedure—including anesthesia— can live in the same, easy-to-use platform.
MEDHOST Anesthesia Experience™ acts as an added feature of the MEDHOST Perioperative Experience™, which was designed with input from nurses and physicians to reduce workflow disruptions and support the entire surgical experience.
This add-on provides quick access to medication documentation, vitals graphing, anesthesia charting and orders—all contained within one comprehensive, clinician-driven application.
Anesthesia documentation is an in-depth account of patient care during the various stages of anesthesia, from pre-anesthesia questionnaires and assessments to post-op monitoring.
Although it’s an integral part of a complex process that involves many moving parts and requires precise coordination between various team members, anesthesia documentation is often treated as a standalone delivery of care.
Without fully integrating anesthesia documentation, delays in the exchange of information between OR team members can cause unnecessary bottlenecks and threaten patient safety.
MEDHOST Anesthesia Experience reduces these delays, and improves patient outcomes, with:
When the responsibility of a patient is transferred from one anesthesiologist to another, efficient communication is vital to preserve the quality and continuity of care. To do this, providers must be able to focus as much on the patient as possible. Vitals graphing and anesthesia documentation solutions should support this process, not disrupt it.
Having the OR team rely on a shared perioperative application allows for seamless hand offs and hassle-free room-to-room utilization that doesn’t disrupt anesthesiology routines.
MEDHOST Anesthesia Experience supports the continuity of care during anesthesia procedures with:
Surgical admissions represent almost half of all revenue that comes through a hospital’s front door.
Despite this, IT support for the OR has become something of a multi-million-dollar cottage industry, reliant on unincorporated technologies and clinicians spending more time shackled to a computer than they do at the operating table.
Unplug your OR team by giving them an application that manages patient anesthesia workflows through a single, comprehensive digital solution.
Learn more about MEDHOST Anesthesia Experience by contacting your Customer Success Executive or reaching out to us at inquiries@medhost.com.
To help hospitals improve performance and consistently provide the highest-quality care, the Joint Commission publishes their National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG) annually.
These standards apply to all Joint Commission-accredited hospitals and behavioral health care organizations.
In 2021, we explored three crucial insights from that year’s report: Identifying and Preventing Patient Suicide Risks, Preventing Mistakes in Surgery, and Reducing Anticoagulant-Associated Patient Safety Risks.
However, since the core safety goals outlined in the NPSG 2022 report remain the same, this blog summarizes the lessons we’ve learned, and how MEDHOST services and solutions can help healthcare providers continue to meet these standards.
According to a study from The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, there are approximately 30,000 suicides per year in the United States. Approximately 5 to 6 percent of those suicides occur in hospitals. In addition, the overall suicide rate is markedly higher in rural areas than in cities.
To help hospitals effectively meet the NPSG standard for compliance, The Joint Commission identifies seven elements of performance (EP) designed to decrease suicide rates in this high-risk group.
To support emergency departments in these efforts, MEDHOST Emergency Department Information System (EDIS) provides screening tools that can be configured to a facility’s specific community health needs, including custom charting options that can be used to identify patients at risk for suicide.
The Joint Commission estimates that 40 to 60 wrong site surgeries happen every week in the United States. A wrong site surgery occurs when a surgical procedure is conducted on the wrong part of the body, or even on the wrong patient.
To improve standardization in surgical scheduling, pre-op, and operating room processes, The Joint Commission suggests providers adhere to the following Universal Protocols for Preventing Wrong Site, Wrong Procedure, and Wrong Person Surgery™.
To help hospitals protect their surgery patients from mistakes that can lead to identification errors, we have made standardization a key feature of our surgical platform, MEDHOST Perioperative Experience. This solution gives users the ability to add checklists that lend clarity and structure to the perioperative experience, ensuring procedures occur at the right place and time.
Anticoagulant medications are important in preventing and treating blood clots. However, oral anticoagulants, such as warfarin and direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs), are also the most common cause of ADEs in older adults, often leading to ER visits and hospitalizations. In 2017, bleeding events from oral anticoagulants led to over 235,000 emergency room visits.
The NPSG identifies eight anticoagulation therapy requirements that apply to all Joint Commission-accredited hospitals and critical access hospitals, as well as ambulatory and nursing care centers.
Once your facility has anticoagulation policies and protocols in place, you can create orders sets for physicians to use in the Order Management module of MEDHOST Physician Experience.
To learn more about how MEDHOST helps support National Patient Safety Goal compliance, please reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
FRANKLIN, Tenn., March 3, 2022 – MEDHOST®, a leading EHR (electronic health record) and healthcare IT solutions provider, has launched a new anesthesia management solution, MEDHOST Anesthesia Experience. The solution supports all essential aspects of anesthesia care across the perioperative workflow.
In conjunction with the MEDHOST Perioperative Experience, the new feature will give anesthesiologists quick access to medication documentation, vitals graphing, anesthesia charting, and orders. These critical tools are combined within a single, comprehensive, clinician-driven application.
The complexity of surgical care workflows has often been a significant challenge in the perioperative setting. By consolidating two essential stages of the surgical workflow and its related documentation into a solitary platform, the MEDHOST Anesthesia Experience helps reduce complexity and improve patient safety.
“We are excited to offer our customers yet another solution to streamline workflows essential to care in the surgical setting,” says Ken Misch, President at MEDHOST. “Giving providers the ability to capture, track, and share anesthesia documentation electronically and in real-time during perioperative care speaks to our commitment to enhancing the digital care experience.”
Customers can learn more about MEDHOST Anesthesia Experience by contacting their Customer Success Executive or reaching out to MEDHOST at inquiries@medhost.com.
Care delivery workflow disruptions are common for most hospitals and are not something to be taken lightly. While delays in any healthcare setting are problematic, they can lead to perilous situations when they occur in the perioperative setting.
For example, in the case of emergency surgery, delays during any stage of surgical care can lead to compromised patient safety. Perceived patient safety issues can quickly become care quality issues that harm a hospital’s reputation and bottom line.
Since the perioperative process often involves many moving parts requiring precise coordination between various team members, streamlining communication and data sharing is essential to avoid disruptions to care delivery.
Anesthesia documentation is one key component of the perioperative process that is often treated as a standalone. In the absence of a fully integrated anesthesia documentation platform that provides continuity of data and streamlined workflows, delays in the communication of critical information can occur.
Surgical care cannot proceed until all team members have completed their perioperative documentation tasks, yet those workflow elements are often disjointed. When anesthesia documentation is siloed in one area and surgical documentation in another, nurses are then forced to tackle the task of sorting through double documentation.
Switching from one system or documentation tool to another creates a massive waste of time. Storing information in multiple areas or duplicating steps in a healthcare workflow can make it easy to miss things like orders or create breakdowns in clear communication. This problem can be further exacerbated with paper-based systems where documentation can be easily lost or misplaced.
By consolidating critical stages of perioperative documentation into one, digitally accessible platform, hospitals can take a crucial step in reducing perioperative delays and ensuring patient safety.
By providing a platform that integrates clinical and anesthesia documentation into a single application, critical patient information can be communicated and shared with the entire care team. MEDHOST Perioperative Experience and MEDHOST Anesthesia Experience help accomplish that task by working in tandem, eliminating the need for duplicate documentation.
Each perioperative team member has one source of truth for accessing and sharing critical patient data such as vitals, charting, and orders. All essential data is easily visible, accessible, and updated in real-time throughout the perioperative workflow. The seamless sharing of information can help reduce disruptions, improve patient safety, and improve the quality of care.
To learn more about MEDHOST Perioperative Experience and MEDHOST Anesthesia Experience, please reach out to your Customer Success Executive today.
Healthcare facilities must constantly reevaluate how they can reduce waste and curb operating costs while creating efficiencies and improving care quality. One of the most critical areas where a hospital cannot afford to lose revenue is in the operating room (OR).
With so much invested in the OR, establishing effective supply management policies and standards is essential. Failure to do so can significantly impact patient care and financially harm a facility’s overall operations. This article will cover sources of OR waste and how it affects your business, along with strategies you can apply to stem its flow.
While sources of waste vary from facility to facility, the most common areas of focus include:
If needed supplies are not available for a specific procedure, you must delay that procedure until the necessary supplies arrive. Delays and cancellations impact physician and patient satisfaction, decrease efficiency, and potentially lead to patient complications.
Your nurses and physicians did not choose healthcare as a career because they are passionate about sorting and searching for supplies. According to an article written for Health Facility Management, nurses spend 20 to 50 of their time searching, moving, or sorting supplies. Spending a significant amount of time pulling for cases or searching for a specific supply can easily lead to burnout.
You and your team can correct the problem of waste in the operating room through policies and inventory tools that help standardize materials management and encourage organizational efficiency. The following strategies can help you optimize your OR workflows in ways that reduce waste, increase clinician satisfaction, and, most importantly, ensure patient safety.
Reducing waste is critical for controlling expenses within your OR and throughout the facility. By implementing some of these strategies to reduce operational and supply waste, you can:
Firsthand clinical user experiences and feedback from advisory groups create the foundation of MEDHOST Perioperative Experience. These design elements help make sure the solution adds more material efficiencies and standardization to your perioperative department.
To learn more about how MEDHOST can help you save costs by optimizing material and supply usage in your OR, reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
In their effort to help hospitals improve performance and consistently provide high quality care, each year The Joint Commission publishes their National Patient Safety Goals (NPSG).
These reports gather information about emerging patient safety concerns and present sets of standards with measurable outcomes applicable to all Joint Commission-accredited hospitals and behavioral health care organizations.
In this series we have touched on goals related to identifying high suicide-risk patients, as well as prevention of wrong site, wrong patient, wrong procedure surgery errors. The third entry of our 2021 NPSG series centers on the reduction of patient safety risks associated with anticoagulant medication use.
As one of the most common medication classes to cause adverse drug events (ADEs), anticoagulants can lead to bleeding events, poor patient outcomes, and increased hospital costs. In this article we provide an overview of the eight required performance elements, along with steps you can take to reduce the risk of patient harm associated with anticoagulation therapy.
Anticoagulant medications are important in preventing and treating blood clots. However, oral anticoagulants, such as warfarin and direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs), are also the most common cause of ADEs in older adults, often leading to ER visits and hospitalizations. In 2017, bleeding events from oral anticoagulants led to over 235,000 emergency room visits.
In a five-year retrospective study conducted by Brigham and Women’s Hospital, they found that 70 percent of ADEs caused by anticoagulants were potentially preventable. Most commonly, the ADEs were due to missed medication doses and incorrect medication directions, such as the wrong drip rate or frequency.
Hospitals can avoid safety issues caused by incorrect anticoagulant dosage and usage by the creation and adherence of protocols designed to identify and communicate the associated risks. The following elements of performance outline eight anticoagulation therapy requirements that apply to all Joint Commission-accredited hospitals and critical access hospitals, as well as ambulatory and nursing care centers.
Element of Performance 1
The first element requires that hospitals use approved protocols and evidence-based practice guidelines to begin and maintain anticoagulation therapy.
Since anticoagulation medications are high-risk medications, organizations will be required to use updated and approved protocols and evidence-based practice guidelines. These guidelines are meant to ensure that the appropriate medication for the indication is selected, as well as the appropriate starting dose and frequency of the medication. Dosing adjustments may be required based on the patient’s age, renal function, liver function, drug-drug interactions, or drug-food interactions. These factors should be addressed in the protocols and practice guidelines.
Element of Performance 2
This element requires that hospitals use approved protocols and evidence-based practice guidelines for anticoagulation reversal and management of anticoagulant-associated bleeding events for each anticoagulant medication.
With bleeding being the most common complication from anticoagulants, having an anticoagulation reversal protocol that uses evidence-based practice guidelines is an integral part of anticoagulation therapy management. These protocols must include which reversal agent should be used based on the anticoagulant medication and the severity of the patient’s bleeding event.
Element of Performance 3
Hospitals are also required to use approved protocols and evidence-based practice guidelines for managing perioperative patients that are on oral anticoagulants. Such guidelines help minimize bleeding risks during surgery.
The perioperative anticoagulant management protocol should:
Element of Performance 4
The fourth element requires that hospitals have a written policy that addresses the need for baseline and ongoing laboratory tests for monitoring and adjusting anticoagulation therapy. Testing ensures that patients are on the correct dose and being monitored appropriately.
Element of Performance 5
Hospitals must establish a process to identify, respond to, and report adverse drug events, including adverse drug event outcomes.
This element also requires that hospitals have a process for:
Element of Performance 6
Providing patients and their families with proper medication education is required when anticoagulant medications are prescribed.
This medication education should include:
Element of Performance 7
The seventh element requires that hospitals only use unit-dose products, prefilled syringes, or premixed infusion bags when available.
This requirement reduces the risk of dosing and medication errors that can occur and increases patient safety by improving the accuracy of the dose administered to the patient.
Element of Performance 8
Hospitals are required to use programmable pumps when heparin is administered through a continuous IV to provide consistent and accurate dosing.
Ensuring patient safety and improving patient outcomes as they relate to all medications, and especially anticoagulation medications, requires constant vigilance. To support hospitals in this task, MEDHOST provides solutions that help reinforce the necessary policies and protocols critical for meeting the eight elements of performance.
Once your facility has anticoagulation policies and protocols in place, you can create orders sets for physicians to use in the Order Management module of MEDHOST Physician Experience. These order sets standardize the ordering process for:
Links to helpful online resources can also be added to order sets via Order Management, providing physicians with direct access to the evidence-based practice guidelines or other references. Some online resources helpful in creating anticoagulation policies and protocols may include:
In addition, contained within pharmacy and nursing workflows, your clinicians can retrieve printable patient education materials. These documents include patient-focused instruction on:
Also, some medications include medication guides that should be given to patients upon the prescribing of those specific medications.
To learn more about how MEDHOST helps support medication processes and helps your facility’s physicians and clinicians ensure proper usage, please reach out to us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
