Data Analytics Winner: LeanTaaS

Nov. 27, 2019
Company leaders believe in using predictive and prescriptive analytics to unlock OR capacity and create a more surgeon-centric process for measuring utilization
The Healthcare Innovation/Healthcare Informatics Innovator Awards Program, for more than a decade, has honored those at the forefront of healthcare IT innovation with its Innovator Awards Program that recognizes leadership teams from provider organizations across the U.S. that have effectively deployed information technology in order to improve clinical, administrative, financial, or organizational performance. As part of the program, over the last few years, we have opened up nominations to vendor solution companies as well. This year, the vendor track of the Innovator Awards Program entailed four product categories that solution providers could submit toward: Value-Based Care, Patient Engagement, Data Analytics, and Data Security. The team at Healthcare Innovation earlier this year announced the winning companies in each of these four product segments: Value-Based Care: CitiusTech; Patient Engagement: Pegasystems; Data Security: Protenus; and Data Analytics: LeanTaaS. In this November/December issue, we profile the Data Analytics category winner, LeanTaaS.

In hospitals and health systems around the country, executive and operational leaders continue to try to identify the right solution upgrades that could solve a specific problem. What they’re often left with is an enterprise full of assets they have paid for but are not getting the most out of. Indeed, while these assets continue to get enhanced over time, which will hopefully lead to better quality care and cost savings, another key element is how these organizations will effectively use them in the most efficient way possible.

There are about 5,000 hospitals in the U.S, and each one may have spent, on average, $200 million on various assets, leading to approximately $1 trillion in assets in the form of operating rooms (ORs), inpatient beds, MRI machines, and cancer and infusion centers, just to name a few, says Sanjeev Agrawal, the president and chief marketing officer of LeanTaaS, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company that uses data science and machine learning to develop solutions that help healthcare companies streamline their operations.

“We have this supply of assets and a demand that is being generated by patient visits—and that demand for healthcare is going to go up even faster than it ever has—so, we continue to need more care across our health systems, but we cannot spend our way to freedom. We have to be much more operationally excellent and optimize the use of each of these assets we have created,” Agrawal says.

Offering an example inside hospitals, Agrawal notes that on any given day, there are chunks of time not being used at any set of ORs. So, there might be 20 ORs and some could be idle for portions of the day, but cases actually could have been going on. Meanwhile, there are other ORs in the same hospital that service until 9 p.m. “Part of the problem is last minute add-ons and emergencies, but a bigger issue is terrible demand-supply matching. The tools being used to schedule and to predict what’s going to happen, and to prescribe what needs to happen in order to fit more patients in at lower costs, just don’t exist. And that’s because EHRs are databases. It’s like if you have a Charles Schwab account to trade, but it doesn’t tell you what to trade,” he contends.

The OR specifically, says Agrawal, is the “economic backbone of the hospital, and given the way time is allocated and used, there is always a supply-demand mismatch for a variety of reasons. What we have found is that through better demand-supply matching, you can unlock anywhere between 10 to 15 percent of capacity, which is huge. Every minute of OR time is worth $100 on average, so if you have 10 ORs and you use one or one-and-a-half of them more each year than you [otherwise] would, each day is worth $50,000 for you—that’s a remarkable amount of revenue,” he explains.

Agrawal adds that a lot of the inefficiencies in the way OR time is managed result from broken processes based on “bad mathematics” and anecdotal/manual ways of decision making. For example, up to 20 percent of allocated time often goes underutilized because of vacations, conferences, teaching obligations, or lack of volume. But this time should be opened up sooner and made available transparently. What’s more, traditional metrics like “block utilization” are not just mathematically flawed, they also lead to the wrong conclusions; two block owners with the same utilization numbers can have a vastly different amount of “reusable time” that can be used to fit cases in, company officials note.

As such, they add, “Despite hundreds of hours spent assembling multiple OR reports, there is often no single source of truth, the data is hard to access, and often surgeons and administrators don’t engage with the data and metrics. Anecdotes and influence often prevail over objective data,” they say.

And while EHR reports, dashboards and business intelligence tools have lots of good information and maintain meticulous records of every encounter, LeanTaaS leaders believe that they only generate historical views and provide high-level direction, leaving the optimization challenge as an exercise for the reader of the reports.

A solution to transform OR performance

Enter LeanTaaS’ iQueue for Operating Rooms solution, which uses predictive analytics, mobile technologies, and cloud-based tools to unlock OR capacity, create a more surgeon-centric process for measuring utilization, and provide objective, data-driven metrics to improve transparency, according to company officials.

As explained by company leaders, the solution consists of three modules: exchange, analyze, and collect: The exchange module identifies and exposes the available inventory of open time to surgeons and clinics needing OR time through an “OpenTable”-like tool for open time. The collect module, meanwhile, mines patterns of OR usage by block owner, surgeon and service line to identify truly repurposable chunks of time—dubbed “collectable block time” at LeanTaaS—as a means of providing perioperative leaders with actionable guidance about how to redistribute underutilized blocks to new or existing surgeons without impacting existing case volume. Collect answers the question, “who can we take time away from without disrupting the whole block schedule?” And then analyze monitors OR performance and applies machine learning to provide forward-looking actionable guidance for surgeons and OR managers. It helps surgeons be more proactive and productive by sending timely mobile alerts that tell them how they’re contributing to OR volumes, how their performance metrics are trending, and ways to improve their utilization.

Results from provider customers who have used the iQueue for Operating Rooms solution—which is currently in 900 ORs across the U.S.—include: a 3 to 5 percent higher prime time utilization (worth more than $500,000 per OR per year); significantly increased access for surgeons looking for OR time; higher patient satisfaction from getting their procedures done sooner; planned, predicted days lead to more productive staff; and the ability to delay opening new ORs, company executives note. More specific examples include UCHealth in Colorado increasing its OR utilization by 4 percent, adding more than $10 million in revenue; MultiCare, in Tacoma, Wash., increasing available OR minutes by 300 percent; OhioHealth repurposing 12 blocks per month; and NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital increasing its cases per day by 13 percent.

Speaking to the broader issue of data analytics in healthcare, Agrawal remarks that while some companies in this space sell clients on dashboards, those types of solutions are what he calls “descriptive analytics,” and can fool customers into thinking that this alone will solve their problems. In reality, he contends, what’s needed are “prescriptive and predictive analytics,” tools such as Waze that use artificial intelligence to forecast certain roads that should be avoided. “Here, you are predicting something based on what has happened in the past to help you do better in the future,” says Agrawal.

In the OR space, that can mean predicting who is unlikely to use their block time well, leading to operations staff to release that time early and make it accessible to others. “Why? Because I can mine patterns of booking in the past and come up with the probability of the use of block time. In the infusion space, I can look at booking patterns historically and can tell you that on Mondays, here is your pattern of behavior of the volume and mix that patients will show up,” Agrawal explains. “So, the first thing I would tell organizations is not to get fooled by analytics solving the problem for you; take a dive deep into asking yourself, ‘what is this analytics going to do for me that I can take action on, measure the results from, and see value?’”

Moving forward, Agrawal draws a comparison to the airline industry, which he notes has done a great job in unlocking capacity by giving patients more tools to check in for flights, get their boarding passes ahead of time, and print their own codes to check their bags. “If you think about this in graph theory, there are nodes and edges. A node is you as a passenger getting dropped off at the airport curbside, checking in, waiting at security, etc. There are many points where you as a passenger get stuck, and in healthcare it’s no different—patients wait, get treated, and then wait some more.”

LeanTaaS currently works with more than 200 organizations in the U.S., and one goal is getting into more hospitals, notes Agrawal. But beyond that, there are dozens of more hospital assets that company leaders believe they can unlock capacity for, in addition to the ones they are already doing such work for.

“We want to have more organizations use our products, we want to have more products we build and take to market, and eventually we want to connect the dots and build the equivalent of an air traffic control. The big vision is by unlocking capacity node by node and connecting them together, we can make the flight path of a patient much more seamless, just like the airports have done,” he says. HI

Sponsored Recommendations

2024's Healthcare Buyer Journey: New Research and Insights

Join us on April 30th for a webinar unveiling insights from the latest study on the Healthcare IT Buying Journey! Discover evolving challenges, effective health data management...

Improving care with AI-powered solutions

Don't miss our April 23rd webinar delving into the transformative impact of AI-powered solutions on healthcare. Join industry leaders Reid Conant and Dr. Patrick McGill as they...

Shield your health system against cyber threats

You won't want to miss out on this imperative April 4th webinar about how you can protect your healthcare organization. Join us to learn how to fortify your health system against...

Healthcare Trends 2024: Trends & Strategies for Future Success

Explore the future of healthcare in 2024 with insights from the Healthcare Industry Trends Report. Stay ahead of the curve as we delve into the latest industry developments and...