In a previous blog, I showed how you can look at a year’s worth of data to look at the average utilization of an MRI machine. The average number of minutes of “patients-on-table” was 550 /day, and the average number of patients was around 14. In this blog, I take it a step further and look at what a typical 550 minute /day looks like.
I selected a day with 557 minutes of patients-on-table with 14 cases, and plotted each case, to the minute.
The visual itself is revealing. In theory, each yellow block is an opportunity. Although I argued previously that you cannot expect 100% utilization, the amount of yellow in this graphic should raise some questions.
Managers should sit with frontline supervisors and staff to better understand the causes for these downtimes. This graphic can serve to facilitate the discussion.
Whatever the causes are, including “no-shows”, failed safety questionnaires, or claustrophobia, they should be tracked and addressed.
The process of assembling the graphic also revealed that there may be an opportunity to standardize data entry among the technologists. There were a couple of examples of “overlap” between patients. One may be due to continuing to process the images after the patient left and the next patient walked in, but in one case, both patients were begun the same time!
My advice to all radiology administrators is don’t wait for a process improvement project to begin thinking about your data’s integrity–start standardizing the process of entering timestamps now, and perform frequent audits.
“Big data” analysis is extremely helpful, but it requires a certain level of trust in the data. Even if it is difficult to capture the exact time of when a patient goes into or out of a room, it is still possible to make assumptions that reasonably estimate those times, but that requires consistency and adherence to the process by all staff.
Although experienced managers often have a good grasp of how their areas are performing, sometimes it takes a carefully crafted image to shine a light on the reality of a process.
The same analytics process can be used for other modalities. Also, beyond Radiology, other entities with available data (e.g., physician practices) can benefit from such an analysis.
If you would like your utilization data analyzed in a similar fashion, please reach out to me via my email at ELYanalytics@Outlook.com