Summary
This Excel-based tool supports Operating Room (OR) optimization through a block utilization dashboard.
Inventors
Matt D'Agostino
What is it? What does it do?
To optimize the scheduling of operating rooms (ORs) for surgery, the available staffed hours in ORs are often divided up into “blocks” which allow the hospital to set aside allocated block time to specific surgeons for booking their patients. “Block utilization” is the key performance metric that looks at each individual block and indicates what percent of allocated block time is being utilized with actual operating case time.
The Operating Room Block Utilization Calculator and Analytics Dashboard—OR Block Tool for short—is an Excel-based tool that supports hospitals in optimizing their OR booking processes to ensure blocked time is being utilized efficiently. The OR Block Tool computes the percentage of time during a surgeon’s block that is being utilized, with the ability to filter the results by month or other drop-down menu options, to allow surgeons and hospitals to easily calculate room use and efficiency.
Why is it better?
Many health systems and hospitals struggle with calculating operating room block utilization due to a lack of standardized metric definitions, manual calculations, or the need to confirm data validity. The OR Block Tool allows hospitals and surgeons to easily and reliably compute block metrics, allowing health systems to focus on navigating results, drawing conclusions, and taking further action to improve.
The OR Block Tool is a customizable Excel extension that requires minimal user input to perform all the computations needed to produce a dashboard view of Block Utilization scores that allows for seamless navigation through drop-down menus. After the rollout at all MedStar Health hospitals, our system experienced a four-month consecutive upward trend in Block Utilization, increasing from 51.5% to 60.2%. The data allows OR Block Committees at each hospital to easily detect low-utilizer surgeons, make strategic changes to the scheduling of blocks, and share utilization results with their surgeons for accountability and inspiration.
What is its current status?
Matthew D’Agostino is a senior performance improvement manager at MedStar Health. While supporting the MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center team, Matthew invented the OR Block Tool and submitted it as a MInnovation.
The MedStar Inventor Services team is now seeking a licensing/collaboration partner to help advance and commercialize this technology. Please contact us at invent@medstar.net.
Page last updated: 7/28/23