The volume of surgeries occurring in the ambulatory setting has been steadily increasing over the past decades. In 2015, nearly 5,500 Ambulatory Surgery Centers treated 3.4 million Medicare patients for a program and beneficiary spending of $4.1 billion [Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. Report to the Congress: Medicare Payment Policy. Washington DC March 2017]. With the increased number of cases, efficiency in ambulatory surgery centers has been a major focus which helps to achieve the patient- and family-centered goals of outpatient surgery and anesthesia – specifically, having patients safely discharged to home in a timely manner and allowing them to return to normal daily function as soon as possible.
In August, 2017, Don Kieffer and his team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ShiftGear came to JHOC to apply their system of Dynamic Work Design (DWD) to the flow of the operating room suites. For a week, they observed how surgeries were performed and took a deep dive into how and why tasks were performed in a certain way. Their goal was to help design work that optimized the biggest asset in JHOC – the staff.
