Perioperative services at better-performing hospitals can contribute up to 68% of a hospital’s revenue, and up to 60% of a hospital’s operating margin. So, it’s not surprising that health system executives are laser-focused on increasing efficiency and utilization.
However, in the pursuit of higher profit margins, many executives are committing a fatal flaw that actually limits their opportunity to foster sustainable, significant expansion: pinning their growth goals on a hope strategy, crossing their fingers that the growth will happen without making the strategic changes that lead to success.
If surgical growth is the goal, isn’t any surgical growth good? Not necessarily. An unfortunate truth of surgical operations is that it’s relatively easy to drive up utilization and not actually realize the growth you need. You can grow but worsen access challenges for critical surgeries. And you can increase access without increasing your margins.
That’s why health systems should avoid a growth strategy that just lets the chips fall where they may and instead focus on strategic surgical growth—defining and working to achieve surgical growth that fits your hospital’s unique goals, addresses the specific needs of both your patient population and care teams, and is sustainable as your organization grows and changes.
When the pressure is on to deliver measurable growth, it can be easy to turn back default practices of pulling block time or blasting out available time. There are a lot of reasons why you’re selling your organization short if you treat your ORs like an open marketplace.
Why the “any growth is good growth” model is failing hospital leaders
1. You’re not addressing your hospital’s specific goals
No two hospitals are the same, and every system’s goals are different. When you take a one-size-fits-all approach to growth, you overlook the strategic goals specific to your hospital. Whether your goals are increasing robotic utilization, better serving a certain patient population, or growing an individual surgical service line, taking specific action to meet these goals requires a differentiated approach.
2. You inadvertently lower efficiency
Especially if you’re only relying on your existing processes and EHR to meet growth goals, you may be increasing the administrative burden on your already busy frontline staff. For example, tasking schedulers with the manual management of block time release is burdensome and takes them away from the more important, strategic work they could do. Worst of all, many of the manual jobs we give them, like running reports, optimizing the schedule, or finding cases for white space, are not one-time tasks. These are daily, weekly, and monthly requirements that we ask them to do both inside and outside of the EHR and it’s difficult to sustain.
We ought to ask ourselves why, despite having competent and hard-working staff, almost two-thirds of all change initiatives in healthcare fail due to issues including poor planning, unmotivated staff, ineffective communication, and widespread changes. We ask too much of them. Simply put, most initiatives place too much burden on operational and clinical staff to continually push toward broad growth goals, especially without the technology infrastructure to limit the administrative burden.
3. You underutilize expensive assets
There are many advantages to offering robot-assisted surgeries–they’re less invasive so recovery times are faster, the risk of infection is lower, and having these assets attracts surgeons to your facility. However, these robotic assets are expensive to buy and maintain, so hospitals need to focus on boosting robotic utilization. When you instead focus on a broad growth goal, you may overlook the importance of making full use of these robots. How many of us have thought that “our robots are just an expensive coat hanger when they’re not being used”?
4. It requires headcount you may not have
Pursuing sweeping growth goals often requires a lot of manual work. For example, you may need to hire more PAT nurses to successfully manage pre-surgical patient prep and more schedulers to manage surgical blocks. If you’re not able to increase headcount–and many hospitals are not–you’re better off focusing your existing team members on meeting one or two specific and measurable goals. This problem will only get worse in the coming years as hospitals deal with a nursing shortage estimated at one million too few nurses by 2030.
5. It ignores your competition
Broad growth goals are often hyper-focused on your specific hospital and don’t consider the competitive landscape. How can you attract and retain surgeons who split cases across multiple local hospitals? How should your strategy for growth shift and adjust in real-time as market dynamics indicate you are losing volume for an important specialty, from a specific group, or in a five-digit zip code?
6. It doesn’t evolve over time to meet your needs
As mentioned earlier, every hospital’s goals are different, and they can–and should–evolve over time. When you’re pursuing specific, actionable goals, you have the ability to make both minor adjustments and major pivots to address changes in organizational priorities, patient population, and surgeon preferences. What if we could have confidence that the strategies we set and adapt over time would automatically be programmed into our daily operations? Without frontline teams having to find the time and will to manually make it so.
Meet strategic surgical growth goals with the power of AI
Hospital operations solutions powered by artificial intelligence can automate many of the burdensome administrative tasks that prevent hospitals from realizing strategic surgical growth, while also providing executives with insights into what’s working and what’s not.
When hospital systems take a focused, thoughtful approach to strategic growth–and augment their approach with powerful AI tools–it can uncover a path toward achieving specific goals, better meeting the needs of specific patient populations, and building long-term sustainability.
About David Atashroo
David Atashroo is the Chief Medical Officer at Qventus. In this role, he leads the design and direction of the Qventus Perioperative Solution, which uses AI and automation to optimize OR utilization and drive strategic surgical growth. Qventus has generated significant results by maximizing efficiencies for notable health systems, such as eliminating over 36,000 excess patient stays, generating an annualized contribution margin exceeding $110M, and enabling 14,000 new surgeries to be scheduled.
He holds a doctorate in medicine from the University of Missouri-Columbia and trained in plastic surgery at the University of Kentucky before completing his postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University School of Medicine. In addition to his role at Qventus, Dr. Atashroo continues his clinical practice at the University of California-San Francisco.