Anesthesia Department Boosts Physician Satisfaction by 30% with Optimized Scheduling

Ochsner Health is driven by innovation, from pioneering new treatments to deploying emerging technologies to performing groundbreaking research. The organization has consistently been named the top hospital in Louisiana by U.S. News & World Report and has also achieved Magnet designation for multiple years.

Ochsner Health’s anesthesiology department offers pre- and postoperative care, pain therapy, diagnostic services, surgical care, and therapeutic procedures. Handling more than 22,600 cases each year, 60 anesthesiologists prevail in their commitment to safety, quality improvement, and best practices.

Challenge

Schedulers were spending anywhere from 60 to 75 hours per month manually creating and publishing the schedule on an Excel spreadsheet. Taking into account not just the number of anesthesiologists, but the entire anesthesia team—which includes CRNAs—and the sheer number of cases the department handled, creating an optimal schedule was an arduous task. It often required edits after completion due to the difficulty of capturing each individual’s preferences the first time around.

With departments across the hospital leveraging different provider scheduling tools, as well as manual scheduling, there was no single, centralized place to access shift or call schedules. There was also no standard process for time-off requests, schedule changes, and other scheduling workflows.

Solution

Realizing that technology could simplify and expedite the process of building provider schedules empowered the anesthesia team to look for a better solution for this time-consuming task. They wanted a platform that could save time and energy by autogenerating schedules, but it also had to be able to account for individual preferences and handle the inherent complexities of the anesthesia department’s scheduling protocols. After implementing PerfectServe Lightning Bolt Scheduling, the anesthesia team saw a number of significant outcomes.

Outcomes

• A Press Ganey survey showed average engagement among physicians in the department went up by nearly 30% six months after implementation
• Request approvals for vacation days went up by 55%
• Time to create and publish schedules shrunk from 67.5 hours per month to 14 hours per month on average—a 79% improvement
• Improvements to OR case handoffs yielded $600k per year in savings
• Utilized analytics and reporting to evenly distribute weekend shifts
• Assignment units in Lightning Bolt are used to inform payroll, with units translating to dollars for each shift worked
• Transparent reporting provided more flexibility and predictability
• Reduced burnout and provider turnover
• Providers now have more autonomy, including the ability to submit requests/preferences for particular shifts (i.e., surge ICU shifts during the peak of COVID)