Description: The 3rd oldest general hospital in the U.S., Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) is a 900-bed medical center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. More than 46,000 inpatients are admitted each year. MGH conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the country, with an annual research budget of approximately $500 million.

Challenge: A need to objectively measure the difference between concurrent and parallel surgical workflow in the OR of the Future (ORF) brought the Radianse technology into MGH. The goal was to identify essential process changes since surgical revenue was limited by OR throughput. Also, patient flow, clinical workflow and safety are constant priorities. MGH also wanted to use location, identity and time factors to record significant clinical events – and the hospital continues to find new and innovative ways to use this capability to improve care.

Solution: MGH piloted the Radianse system in the ORF, and has since installed and uses Radianse applications to track patients, staff and equipment.

Benefits: Measured throughput gains greater than 40 percent; improved surgical patient management from admission to discharge and increased capacity for additional procedures.

In their words:

“There is tremendous value in being able to objectively measure the interactions among the clinical teams and with their patients. This is not a human observer with a clipboard watching every move. We remove any hint of bias, or human error, and collect true measures of patient flow-time, wait-time and resource utilization from registration to surgery to recovery information that we can use to tackle some very compelling challenges: are we wasting time, missing opportunities, stretching our staff too far, compromising safety?"

Marie Egan, RN, MS
Project manager for the ORF