Alpha Consulting Group, Inc.

Needless to say, we have experienced more disruption in healthcare in the last few months than any other time in history. Historical costs, length of stay and case mix have gone out the door. Hospitals had to suspend elective surgery, just in case there was a surge in Covid 19 patients. Thankfully, in many places, social distancing and stay at home orders prevented a large surge from occurring. Today we are starting to see many parts of the country begin to re-open and wi...th that, the slow ramp up of elective surgery. There will be multiple variables impacting a hospital’s ability to ramp up their elective schedule. Initially that will primarily be done by following the joint statement of the American College of Surgeons, American Society of Anesthesiologists and the American Organization of Perioperative Registered Nurses. Additionally, there will be individual state mandates requirements and a slew of operational, fiscal and supply chain related barriers to address. Most facilities will have a backlog of cases to address. How will they be able to address that backlog in the most efficient and cost-effective manner while staying within all required guidelines, and what impact is that going to have on their ability to make up lost revenue from the crisis? For the last several weeks we have been working with a team from the global consulting firm, Aarete, to develop an analytics tools with their data scientists, in an effort to design a tool to help hospitals in their decision making when ramping up the elective surgery schedule. The tool is powerful and customizable, and allows hospitals to determine how to adjust their schedule to maximize utilization, efficiency and profitability while also accounting for limiting factors related to supply chain, human resources, patient census and other clinical variables. Once the crisis has past, this tool will allow the OR operations committee to perform what if analysis of the surgical block schedule to determine what impact changes will have on the profitability of the department. If you would like to see a demonstration of how this product works, please email [email protected] or give us a call at 888-632-5742, or contact Luke Henderson at [email protected] or 214-914-0476. Call us, we can help!

The World Health Assembly has named 2020 as The Year of the Nurse and Midwife in honor of Florence Nightingale’s 200th birthday. Here in the US, nurses are practicing in so many different settings, e.g., hospitals, schools, ambulatory centers, public health, military, research and so many other areas! In times like this, when we are facing health threats such as the potential outbreak of the Coronavirus world-wide, it highlights the importance of the nurse’s role in the wor...ld. Nurses frequently must take risks when caring for patients with a communicable disease, caring for violent patients with uncontrolled mental health issues and helping our injured troops in military outposts, just to name a few. One of the ways that Alpha Consulting Group has been paying it forward is the annual Alpha Consulting Scholarship. Over the last 10 years we have provided over $20,000 in scholarships through the Association of California Nurse Leaders. We are very proud of our record of supporting life long learning to our nursing colleagues. This year is no exception. We would like to congratulate Charise Lyn Tabotabo, MSN, RND-NIC for being awarded the 2020 Alpha Consulting Scholarship! Charise is currently an advanced clinician and charge nurse at Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women and Children. Charise is currently working on her DNP in Health Systems Leadership at The University of San Diego. We are very proud of Charise’s accomplishments and scholarship award and ask you to join us in wishing her continued success. See more

Last month I wrote about strategies for increasing utilization of surgical blocks. This month I would like to talk about strategies to increase overall room utilization even further. Generally, most hospitals with block scheduling programs have a policy on release time. Basically, if a surgeon is going to be away on vacation or at a meeting, or just having a slow week, they must call the scheduling office before a certain time frame. If they do this, they are given cre...dit for the time, and it does not count against their block utilization at the end of the month. Frequently this release time is just a few days, or up to a week. Additionally, this release time is generally the same for all practices and specialties. When the release time is less than a week, it is often difficult to fill the block with other physicians’ cases which leads to gaps in the schedule. We believe that the release time given to a specific practice, or physician, should be based on the type of practice and/or specialty. For example, if a practice, or specialty, frequently covers the emergency room, that practice should have a shorter release time. Both general orthopedics and general surgery may fall into this category. There are also a number of practices that are typically scheduling elective surgery that may be scheduled several weeks in the future. In that case, the release time could be 2 to 3 weeks prior. This method gives the hospital sufficient time to fill the scheduling gaps, and the ability for those surgeons with a busy ED practice to schedule their patients in a timely manner. We believe that these release times should be assigned by the governing body empowered to oversee blocks and that all block participants should have release times. However, we do not believe that these practices or surgeons should get credit for this time in their monthly utilization results. Our rationale for this is 2-fold, first, we think that blocks should be reviewed on a quarterly basis, not monthly. Even if time is released in one quarter, there should be enough volume over the quarter to meet utilization goals. Secondly, we have seen some surgeons that are very good at releasing block time weekly. We have observed a surgeon whose block utilization report cited a 75% utilization rate, due to time released, when actually the surgeon only utilized 25% of their time. The ultimate goal of blocks is to improve the overall utilization of the OR by rewarding those physicians that consistently use their time. If you are having trouble achieving this ultimate goal, call us, we can help! See more

We all know that Turnover Time is the most discussed performance indicator in the Perioperative arena. This is the time from one patient leaving the room until the next patient enters. In our experience in acute care hospitals, the average turnover time for all cases runs about 23 minutes. This overall average can mask performance issues if not watched carefully. One high volume specialty with exceptional turnover times may bring down the average, leaving inefficient s...Continue reading