The vision
A freestanding children’s hospital needed to improve perioperative and procedural operations. Scheduling operating room (OR) cases was one of its biggest challenges. Bottlenecks in processes had created a significant backlog—causing some children to wait months for a surgical date or have to go elsewhere. Leaders fielded complaints from surgeons, staff, and patients nearly every day. It was time for a new approach.
Co-creating the solution
The hospital partnered with Chartis to make many processes across the perioperative care continuum more effective and efficient—especially OR scheduling and block management.
Stakeholder collaboration and buy-in were critical to success. Small multidisciplinary teams with surgeon and anesthesia representation made decisions each week to adopt leading practices, such as developing OR scheduling and block management guidelines, building a centralized scheduling office, aligning on a more effective governance structure, standardizing metrics and reporting processes, and improving intraoperative processes.
Believe in better
The children’s hospital set up a centralized scheduling office, enhanced Epic capabilities to support data-driven business decisions, and rebuilt scheduling workflows to enable smooth transitions from the clinic to OR. These strategies reduced wait times for surgeries, enhanced stakeholder satisfaction, and improved the organization’s throughput and performance.
