Decision Support in Theatre Scheduling Improves Throughput and Planned vs Actual
Subjectivity in theatre scheduling (particularly regarding list capacity) and disagreement between elective bookings & the peri-operative team regarding list capacity were challenges facing Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital.
In an effort improve their processes Lady Clento:
• Converted the theatre matrix from an excel spread sheet to a database and implemented a single source of truth report to align peri-operative resource capacity with theatre matrix demand
• Enhanced source of truth bookings report to include estimates, surgeon averages, overall averages and overall % booked
• Provided easy/real time access to all business users
• Implemented drill through reports to allocated vs actual session detail providing easy/intuitive access to historical performance information
As a result, the following improvements have been noted:
• Improved throughput despite no real change in traditional indicators for session utilisation
• Improved alignment in planned vs actual