Quantifying provider team efficiency and its relationship to OR cost and other OR metrics

Abstract

Background and objectivesThis study seeks to establish Provider Team Efficiency (PTE) as a useful operating room efficiency metric and to associate a dollar value as a cost to the institution for a decrement in PTE for each site within our academic center's network. In the secondary analysis, multiple weighted linear regressions were performed to determine additional institutional factors, which might affect the corresponding PTE. MethodsPTE is defined here as total surgical hours per total CRNA staffed hours per day, from 07:00 to 17:00, for the calendar year of 2018, within each surgical site represented as a percentage. Six institutional locations with operating rooms in a large academic health network were involved in data collection, where multivariate weighted linear regressions were performed on PTE, Operating Cost per Hour, Number of operating rooms working per day, Number of surgical cases in a year, Hours per case, and Hours per OR per day. ResultsThe weighted regression analysis demonstrated that every 1% increase in PTE was correlated with just over an $11 decrease in cost per OR hour (p = 0.02, R2 = 0.76). No statistically significant results were found with hours per case, number of cases, or the average number of operating rooms running per day; however, there was a strong, positively associated correlation between hours per OR per day and PTE (p = 0.005, R2 = 0.89). ConclusionsThe primary analysis in our current work illustrates that Provider Team Efficiency (PTE) is negatively correlated with OR cost per hour to a statistically significant degree associated with a loss of a fixed dollar amount. In the secondary analysis, while total operating rooms, total cases, and case duration did not appear to correlate with PTE, Hours per OR per Day had a strongly positive association. This has substantial ramifications for operating room practice management since Hours per OR per day- a much more readily available metric- can be used as a surrogate value for PTE in determining OR cost savings per hour.