OR Benchmarks Collaborative names the 2009 Top Performers

Faced with today’s unrelenting financial demands and quality of care challenges, leading hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers are turning to comparative healthcare benchmarks to help them improve operating room (OR) performance. Six of these trailblazers have been recognized by one such service, the OR Benchmarks^® Collaborative (ORBC), as 2009 Top Performers that have used ORBC data to achieve significant results. The ORBC is a partnership between McKesson and OR Manager, Inc. with member organizations in the United States and Canada. It provides a Web-based subscription service designed to help healthcare organizations monitor, assess and improve performance in the operating room.

Saint Barnabas Medical Center was named the Best Overall Performer among academic hospitals in the United States. The Livingston, N.J.-based hospital achieved the highest composite score on 15 metrics that assess performance in five key areas: start time accuracy, case time effectiveness, turnover, scheduling accuracy, and utilization.

“I find this recognition extremely credible since it is based on performance improvement that’s validated through extensive statistical analysis,” said Ylone Xavier, vice president of performance improvement at Saint Barnabas. “It truly rewards us for the improvements that we have made.” By leveraging the data available in ORBC, Saint Barnabas improved OR on-time starts from 52 percent to 68.5 percent in just one month.

To ensure an unbiased quality analysis, McKesson engaged an outside research organization specializing in clinical data management to complete the award analysis by applying a rigorous statistical process. Other organizations recognized as 2009 Top Performers are:

Best Overall Performer, Ambulatory Surgical Center

• Gaston Memorial Hospital Outpatient Surgery, Gastonia, NC – United States
• Mt. Sinai Hospital, Toronto – Canada

Best Overall Performer, Academic Hospital

• Kingston General Hospital, Kingston, Ontario – Canada

Best Overall Performer, Non-Academic Hospital

• Kaiser Permanente Woodland Hills Medical Center, Woodland Hills, Calif. – United States
• Riverside Healthcare Facilities, Fort Frances, Ontario – Canada

As the cornerstone of McKesson’s Performance Benchmarks offering, the ORBC focuses on the efficiency and throughput performance of operating rooms. With more than 400 members and 5.5 million case records, the ORBC is the industry’s most comprehensive surgery database. “The magnitude of data across our subscribers allows us to perform considerable analysis with the intention of gleaning best practice and disseminating it among the OR community at large,” said Tina Foster, RN, vice president of benchmarking solutions at McKesson Provider Technologies. “McKesson is setting the standard for measuring OR performance.”

Using ORBC data, Kaiser Permanente ASC, located in San Diego and winner of the ORBC Ambulatory Surgical Center Award for scheduling accuracy, reinvented its work culture all together. “Objective data gives staff members insight into what they need to improve,” states Beverly Roling, director of Perioperative Services at the center. “As a result, the team has been able to improve room turnover times and the surgery center now performs 10 additional surgeries each day.”

“The consistent improvements made by these award winners show just how powerful reliable, objective data can be – and how it can help organizations remain cost-efficient in these challenging economic times,” said Connie Moser, vice president of Performance Management Solutions, McKesson Provider Technologies. “The ability to provide this much comparative information in one central location makes the ORBC unique in the industry. And, having this much information in one location could be an important step toward establishing national standards.”