Note: Responses edited for length and clarity.
Question: Waste in healthcare isn’t limited to mismanaged supplies. How do you think about waste in healthcare and what types of waste do you believe ASC leaders should immediately address?
Chad Ramos: Three main areas of waste are always on healthcare executives’ minds. The first one is reducing wasted time. Staff shortages are a significant problem right now, so making every employee more valuable and efficient is certainly. The second one is reducing costs and supplies. I think that’s important to address and maybe has never been more important with inflation and global supply chain issues. Finally, the third is reducing wasted talent. Executives don’t spend enough time thinking about maximizing the talent they have in their organizations.
Q: Let’s drill down on wasted time. How can healthcare organizations reduce wasted time? What benefits can time savings yield for organizations and individuals?
CR: I think the best way to mitigate a staff shortage is to reduce the time it takes for them to do their job. It’s the easiest, low-hanging fruit to make your employees more efficient. They’ll be happier; therefore, they’ll do better at their job.
It’s not an easy solution, but three companies are focused on saving employee time. One of them is OR Scheduler. They’ve got a great case study with the largest surgery center in Texas doing 30,000 cases a year. They’re trying to solve the time it takes for an average manager or director to build the schedule for the next week or the week after.
Many nuances need to be considered when building an OR schedule. This company uses machine learning and AI to automatically consider all of those variables and assign the right people to optimize the staff in the room.
In the Texas case study, the solution reduced the time spent on the schedule from 20 hours a week to 15 minutes. That means that if that OR director or manager spends 20 hours less doing a specific thing, they have all this extra time to scrub in, be with patients and help staff.
Q: What about financial waste? Where are ASCs needlessly losing money? How can leaders address those challenges?
CR: We see two areas where organizations around the country are dealing with this type of waste. One is wasted supplies, which comes with a waste of time, effort and supplies.
The second area is a wasted opportunity as it relates to comparing surgeons. We see many preference cards across multispecialty centers with many surgeons. There’s a huge gap, usually between the most expensive surgeon and the least expensive surgeon. It’s because they’re not communicating. The larger your ASC, the more money it costs to be wrong on your preference cards.
To help this issue, we compare surgeons and ensure that the variables across preference cards are as small as possible. We have reports showing which surgeons use materials and which items can be replaced. Tou have to be able to give surgeons good data. You have to be able to look at the data and say, “Hey, this isn’t going to change patient outcomes — your peers doing the same procedure for half the cost.”
Q: Finally, can you share some thoughts on reducing wasted talent?
CR: When I’m referring to wasted talent, I’m referring to employees that could be great assets for the business but, for one reason or another, leave. A book called People First by Amy Lasko references a study showing that new grad turnover is as high as 30 percent in the first year and as high as 57 percent in year two. Those numbers are scary when you think about the staffing shortage that we already have. If we can’t even get new people to come in, we’re in for a world of hurt. The new generation is speaking a completely different language from their older colleagues. The younger generation needs to derive a sense of meaning from their job. One of the things that you can do to help build that meaning is fostering connection among teammates.
