Managing Operating Room Cost in Cardiac Surgery with Three Process Interventions

Health care providers in both public and private sectors are facing increasing pressure to improve their cost efficiency and productivity. The increasing cost of new technological solutions has enforced the application of operations management techniques developed for industrial and service processes. Meyer’s (2004) review of existing research shows that, on average, operating rooms (ORs) operate only at 68% capacity. Using OR time efficiently is especially challenging when long operations are scheduled to fixed OR block time. This situation is typical in open heart surgeries where a high variability in the length of required OR time combined with four and a half hour average OR time duration makes scheduling two operations during a normal eight-hour workday difficult. The objective of this chapter is to analyze the effect that three process interventions have on the OR cost in ORs performing open heart surgeries. The investigated process interventions are four days OR week (4D), the better accuracy of operating room time forecast (F), and doing anesthesia induction outside the OR (I). These interventions emerged from practical organization context. This chapter is organized as follows. First we provide a review of the existing literature on measures of OR utilization and the investigated three interventions. Based on existing literature, we construct a simulation model to test the interventions’ effects on OR utilization. Conclusions of results are presented, and practical implications and new contributions to existing theory of OR management are discussed. Background