Surgical subspecialty block utilization and capacity planning: a minimal cost analysis model

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Operations Research
• Surgical Workflow Optimization
• Hospital Resource Management

Background:

• Traditional operating room (OR) utilization metrics obscure operational inefficiencies.
• New metrics, underutilization and overutilization, are introduced to better detect these inefficiencies.
• Capacity planning for surgical subspecialty block time can be optimized using a minimal cost analysis (MCA) model.

Purpose of the Study:

• To define and illustrate the use of underutilization and overutilization metrics for evaluating surgical subspecialty OR use.
• To describe capacity planning for OR block time using an MCA model.
• To quantify potential cost savings from implementing MCA-based OR block time budgets.

Main Methods:

• Post hoc evaluation of 58,251 surgical cases over 6 years at a teaching hospital.
• Categorization of surgical records relative to budgeted OR block time, defining underutilization and overutilization.
• Fitting probability distributions to surgical demand and estimating MCA block time budgets to minimize costs.

Main Results:

• Analysis of 10 surgical subspecialty blocks revealed classic utilization ranging from 44-113%.
• Average daily underutilization ranged from 16% to 60%, while overutilization ranged from 4% to 49%.
• Significant potential cost savings were identified if MCA budgets were implemented.

Conclusions:

• Underutilization and overutilization are crucial metrics for assessing OR schedule quality and utilization efficiency.
• These metrics facilitate capacity planning through the MCA model.
• Implementation of MCA budgets offers substantial potential for operational cost savings in ORs.