Understanding Turnover Time
Turnover Time is a core component of measuring OR efficiency. Turnovers exceeding their scheduled durations have downstream impacts on OR operations for the remainder of the day. These impacts include delays in subsequent cases, decreased efficiency, increased costs, and reduced patient, surgeon and staff satisfaction.
The Apella dashboard makes Turnover Time easy to manage with automatic time tracking.
Using Turnover Time in your business
Hospitals with the best turnovers look at turnover time frequently, perhaps weekly. If the staff had a great week of turnover performance, they praise the team.
On the other hand, sometimes there are hiccups. Use Apella to find turnovers that are substantially longer than your goal time. Apella will give you some insight into whether the cleaning took extra time or the room set-up. If you need more information, you can drop to the video to see for yourself what happened.
You might start to see themes where you can train your team on better processes or maybe there is just a resource bottleneck. Keeping an eye on your turnovers regularly, will help your OR run smoothly.
The Apella dashboard has many filter and grouping options to help you look at the turnovers that are most relevant to you. The Apella dashboard can filter turnovers by surgeon, procedure, turnover duration, day, and other parameters to reveal how turnover properties impact turnover time.
Definitions
Cleaning phase: The duration of time when a room is being cleaned between Patient wheels out and Back table opened
Opening phase: The duration of time when a room is being prepared for surgery between Back table opened and Patient wheels in .
Flip rooms: An indicator of when the surgeon is running multiple rooms. These are typically filtered out or tracked separately.
Calculating Turnover time
Turnover time is determined by the consecutive time that a patient is wheeled out of an operating room, to the time a patient is wheeled into that same operating room.
Average turnover is determined by dividing the total aggregate turnover time (in minutes) by the total number of turnovers.
Customization
At the time of writing, April 2023, Apella does not offer customization tools to update parameters that determine turnover times. We understand some hospitals use different parameters for turnover times, and plan to release custom parameters in a future update.