At the most recent CPE Spring Forum, we celebrated our exceptional inaugural cohort of the 2025 Academy Fellows Program supported by an educational grant from GE HealthCare.
Within their transformative two-year journey, Fellows complete a strategic action project. This month we are thrilled to feature a strategic action project from a recent graduate from Baptist Health who led an initiative around surgical optimization.
2025 Academy Fellow: Theodore Glasser, MD, MHA, SFHM, Vice President of Medical Affairs, Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville
Opportunity & Problem Statement:
Baptist Health, a 6-hospital system serving Northeast Florida faced a few challenges that this project sought to address:
1) Operational oversight of robotic cases often resulted in delays in scheduling robotic cases and margin/case shortfalls.
2. Inefficiencies with surgical supply utilization.
3) Mortality index statistics were higher than expected, given the number of observed mortalities.
Methods: We engaged key stakeholders and convened our the Robotic and Block Committees to examine surgeons’ schedules and blocks. We increased release time and worked to ensure that non-robotic cases weren’t done in robotic-equipped OR’s, which marginally increased access. This required adjusting OR RN staffing levels to ensure access to non-robotic OR's. Additionally, I partnered with key surgeons and the service line director to advance a “per click” lease arrangement, leading to the lease of new robots and increased robotic access. Secondly, we optimized preference cards, led by our service line director to ensure that cases had the right supplies in the right status. We examined the use of high-cost items and reduced clinical variation through facilitated discussion with surgeons. Finally, we worked with Vizient to benchmark our mortality and case mix index. We identified documentation gaps in capture of conditions present on admission and comorbidities. Documentation education was rolled out to hospitalists and surgeons and we created tools to more accurately describe patients’ conditions.
Results & Conclusions: This project exceeded all expectations.
Robotic access was increased and surgeons scheduled more robotic cases in shorter time frames. Robotic cases increased, along with same surgeon nonrobotic cases. Making it easier for surgeons to bring their robotic cases may have induced them to bring their non-robotic cases and keep their blocks full.
Preference card optimization led to a greater than $9 million impact in FY 2024, with $3.8 million in savings from standardization of supplies and $5.4 million in savings from reduction of opened and prn items that were not being used.
CDI efforts led to a decrease in our Mortality Index based on improved capture of POA conditions and more accurate documentation of comorbidities. Efforts also led to improved revenue capture of over $34 million at our two largest hospitals in FY 2024.
Applications for THMA’s Fellowship Programming are now open. If you are interested in learning more or nominating a healthcare leader, please reach out to LDPrograms@hmacademy.com.