Understanding Case Lengths
Case Length measures the total time during which the patient is in the operating room, including pre-operative, inter-operative, and post-operative phases. Once you’ve set up your account with Apella, you can track Case Lengths and their phases automatically on the Apella Dashboard.
Using case length in your business
Case Length is one of several metrics that can be used to understand overall OR efficiency. It provides general insight into the duration of your procedures, and how that duration changes over time. Typically Case Length is the sum total of the pre-operative phase, inter-operative phase, and post-operative phase.
Filtering cases by specific parameters can reveal localized inefficiencies happening in your OR and their root causes. The Apella Dashboard can filter cases by surgeon, procedure, time of day, date, and other parameters to reveal how case properties impact Case Length.
Definitions
Start time (Actual): The actual time a patient is wheeled into the operating room, as determined by Apella’s advanced computer vision "wheels in" algorithm.
Drape placed (Actual): The actual time the surgical drape is placed on the patient, as determined by Apella’s advanced computer vision "patient drape" algorithm.
Drape removed (Actual): The actual time the surgical drape is taken down, as determined by Apella’s advanced computer vision "patient undrape" algorithm.
End time (Actual): The actual time a patient is wheeled out of the operating room, as determined by Apella’s advanced computer vision "wheels out" algorithm.
Pre-Operative Phase: The duration of time between Start time (Actual) and Drape placed (Actual)
Inter-Operative Phase: The duration of time between Drape placed (Actual) and Drape removed (Actual)
Post-Operative Phase: The duration of time between Drape removed (Actual) and End time (Actual)
Calculating case length
Case Length is determined by subtracting the actual start time from the actual end time, as determined by Apella’s advanced computer vision algorithms. The mean of a set of case lengths determines a Case Length Average.
Phase Length is determined by measuring the time between specific OR events. The Apella dashboard segments cases into 3 phases: pre-operative, inter-operative, and post-operative.
Filtering and exporting
Use the options in the Apella dashboard to filter, sort, and organize which case lengths and averages to review. Click Download to export your filtered cases as a .csv file for further analysis and reporting.
FAQ
My dashboard is not showing the Pre/Post/Intra case time columns, what does that mean?
Depending on a number of factors, Apella’s machine learning model may not be able to detect the draping events needed to define Pre-Op, Inter-Op, and Post-Op phases. We are actively working on our model to better serve these use cases.
When I download my data, Case Duration is shown as a combination of numerals and text (ie: 100 minutes ) How can I isolate the numerals, so I can run excel functions on it?
Select the text or column, then click Data > Split text to columns. Select the delimiter your text uses (comma, space, semicolon, period, or custom character) or select Detect automatically. Learn more
My dashboard shows a time for Intra-Op time, but is showing dashes for Pre-Op and Post-Op time.
This just means that Apella’s AI wasn’t able to detect a Pre-Op and Post-Op phase. This could be because it is a procedure type where Pre-Op and Post-Op are negligible parts of the case or because the AI hasn’t yet learned to detect the events that indicate these phases. Our AI is always learning, so these cases should become more rare over time.
Can’t find what you need?
For more information, contact your Customer Success Manager.