“Our day used to start at least two hours behind,” he said. “IRs were lucky to go home at 7 or 8 p.m.” Late starts also lead to fewer patients treated, increased length of stays and decreased patient and workforce satisfaction he said.
They brought in quality and patient safety experts to help improve this workflow.
“We wanted to create a process so that our first case of the day was on track 30% of the time within 100 days,” he said. To do this, they collected data for a week on every checkpoint, then held an in-depth team conference where everyone looked at every step of the patient experience—from arriving in the parking lot to leaving recovery—to find the root cause of inefficiency.
From there, they created a priority matrix to determine which fixes could be done quickly, which would be major projects, and which would take a long time to implement. Then they put the plan into action.
According to Dr. Weintraub, they had patients receive confirmation calls the night before and arrive earlier. One of the doctors was assigned a day of the week to serve as central command.
Then they put in a system so that drugs could be localized, rather than retrieved from a central pharmacy. They added more computers to the practice, put up better signage, and then standardized the supply room and how techs made up trays.
Within 30 days, Dr. Weintraub said, they went from having 1.7% of cases start on time to 6%. Within 100 days, 76% of the first cases started on time.
“This makes an impact on the entire day,” Dr. Weintraub said, “and it improves our patient experience.”
Conclusion Quality and safety programs are complicated, but they are crucial for improving patient and workforce experience and creating better patient outcomes. Through an open culture of communication and data-informed improvement, any facility can become engaged in actively learning and improving, rather than assigning blame and perpetuating shame.
“You can’t change the human condition,” Dr. Ahmed said, “but you can change the condition they work in.”
This article originally appeared in SIR Today. Visit
sirtoday.org for more SIR 2023 recaps, interviews and deep dives.
External factors like noise, light and distractions, and internal factors like stress, fatigue, hunger or illness all play a part in creating errors and can happen to anyone.
IR Business Center from the Society of Interventional Radiology, an online marketplace for interventional radiology practices of all types to obtain key resources, services, and products.
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