At this year’s CHIME16, the annual national meeting of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, Steve Hess, our CIO accepted the prestigious CHIME collaboration award. CHIME is the largest organization of healthcare CIO’s, over 900 at present count. What a great recognition from Steve’s peers to be recognized in this way.
Steve’s work with LeanTaas is groundbreaking in that we now apply machine learning tools to improve scheduling of our infusion center chairs for chemotherapy. Our hospital’s substantial growth has outpaced the capacity of our infusion center. This had resulted in patient dissatisfaction, as well as lots of nurse overtime. Steve worked with Sanjay from LeanTaas to co-develop a scheduling tool that would, with minimal adjustments, dramatically improve throughput using predictive modeling. Peak waiting times dropped by 33%, with no increase in nurse staffing or increase in facility space. Very cool. In particular, the tool can tell the nurses what to expect about their upcoming day, not just scheduled patients, but also anticipated overbooks, and can guide ‘where and when’ to place last minute add-ons to keep things flowing. Really great predictive tool. Now, our opportunity is to use this in our OR, our ED, and throughout our enterprise. This is our first big step into predictive analytics, with clever and effective feedback loops to drive change of behavior.
Congrats to Steve. We’re on a great path, thanks to your leadership.
