Faster OR Care and Big Savings with Analytics in Epic

Instead of building additional facilities to increase available operating room spots for patients, Children’s Hospital Colorado leaned on technology to optimize their existing OR schedules. After using analytics in Epic to investigate scheduling patterns and improve workflows, they see more patients with significantly shorter wait times and have saved approximately $2 million as a result.

CHCO used dashboards in Epic to find availability for additional surgeries using existing resources. They found that surgeries often took longer than the time allotted on the schedule, so surgeons sometimes blocked off buffer time on their schedules to account for run-over.

With updated surgery lengths and more accessible data in Epic for surgeons and staff, scheduling is more efficient and transparent. Surgeons have access to each other’s schedules, and a wall-mounted monitor shows benchmarks for scheduling capacity on a dashboard in Epic. Each surgeon can use reports to analyze their scheduling patterns.

“Scheduling at the right time just makes everything downstream work better,” said Kerri Webster, CHCO’s chief analytics officer.

Children’s Hospital Colorado is the first pediatric organization to receive HIMSS Stage 7 recognition for success in analytics including their OR scheduling project. Epic community members can read more about CHCO’s project in their Success at Seven newsletter on the UserWeb.