STERIS Offers New Surgical Solution for Highly Efficient Perioperative Environments

Picture the typical surgical department, with its full schedules, surgeon and staffing needs, surgical instrument requirements, unexpected changes and delays, coordination demands from other departments, and anxious patient families waiting for word on their loved ones. Now imagine transforming this perioperative area into a calm, predictable high performance environment by improving surgeon and staff awareness and control, and by eliminating hundreds of phone calls a day.

Imagination can become reality. STERIS Corporation introduces the RealView Visual Workflow Management Software, one of the newest STERIS solutions to help healthcare providers achieve highly efficient healthcare environments. The RealView software and its Command Center comprise a live, patient-centric, LEAN visual management system that optimizes perioperative workflow, efficiency and throughput.

With patient health and fiscal health at stake in the surgical department every day, its important to provide tools that help the perioperative team work smarter, not harder, says Randy Tomaszewski, director of marketing for perioperative solutions at STERIS. This means, among other things, reducing bottlenecks and manual processes and more efficiently managing the daily flow of patients, surgeons and staff through the department. Our Command Center facilitates these functions and many more.

Specifically, this perioperative workflow management solution enables continuous visibility and communication of the OR schedule to help improve surgical throughput. The Command Center allows the surgical team to quickly adjust to exceptions and delays such as emergencies, add-on cases and unpredictable longer-than-usual procedures. The software instantly updates the scheduling boards and automatically notifies key physicians and staff about when and where they are needed, which eliminates additional phone calls.

The real-time visibility of critical information extends to all stakeholders in the perioperative loop.  Various display screens provide appropriate information to pre and post-op teams, OR managers, surgeons and anesthesiologists, and patient families. This provides valuable situational awareness for all of the critical people involved with the surgical patient that day.

This STERIS solution also incorporates automatic functions into the perioperative workflow, which provides a number of benefits. It uses a real-time location system (RTLS) Care Tag with a unique identification number for each patient, which automatically time-stamps and communicates patient flow data at each point of care. This reduces the amount of manual data entry required of staff. The software also uses this data to send instant updates to waiting families, onsite and remotely if needed, which helps improve patient satisfaction, family satisfaction, and HCAPHS* scores.

The Command Center also has a performance dashboard capability, which captures and displays the data most important to each facility. This data is selected from a menu of key performance indicators by the surgical management team. The use of automated event documentation produces objective data on indicators such as OR utilization, surgical on-time starts, prime-time utilization and others, and offers management the opportunity to benchmark and improve performance.

After integrating the RealView Visual Workflow Management Software with their existing major surgical information systems, hospitals have documented significant workflow efficiency improvements. Some have demonstrated an increase of up to 85 percent in OR utilization and a 146 percent improvement in surgical volume without adding ORs or overtime. For more real-world, documented results, visit: http://www.steris.com/documents.cfm?id=M3657EN.