An intelligent hospital operating room to improve patient health care
Abstract Optimizing management of multiple hospital operating rooms (ORs) is a complex problem. A large hospital can have upwards of greater than 50 with a large number of different procedures per day and per OR that needs to be scheduled several weeks in advance. Each procedure requires gathering a team led by a surgeon for a specific block of time in the OR, but even common procedures such as cholecystectomies, which account for about 1.4 million cases per year in the USA, exhibit a significant variation in total procedure duration. OR time is one of the most significant budget chapters in a modern hospital, and it has also been shown that delays in OR procedures due to lapses in scheduling and/or OR resources availability have been responsible for post-surgical complications. We propose an innovative, cost effective hardware/software OR awareness solution that automatically (i) detects what step of the procedure the OR team is at, (ii) determines if steps are out of order, (iii) identifies and pinpoints procedural delays, irregularities, and unused OR time, and (iv) can assist in root cause analyses and assessment. Most institutions have an electronic OR management software system in place that allows for easy projection and visualization of the daily OR schedule, but all rely heavily on manual data entry resulting in human error and bias. There exists a need not only for a fully automated, unbiased, and accurate OR management system that also collects key procedural data for both real-time and retrospective analyses but also for an intuitive and user-friendly digital interface. With our system, we have been able to track and collect data on almost 300 cases to not only identify but quantify sources of inefficiency as well as automatically indicate cases that exceed expected lengths.