Making appointments for ambulatory surgery at private medical centers involves several risks:
- Assigning a surgeon who is not authorized by the paying entity to perform the medical procedure on the premises of the medical institution.
- Assigning a surgeon who is not authorized by the medical institution to perform the procedure on its premises.
- Scheduling a surgical procedure that requires reserving and ordering additional resources needed for the proper execution of the surgery and which, if missing as a result of a requisition error, can endanger human life or cause the postponement or cancellation of the operation after it has begun.
- Involvement of a regulator who monitors whether patient wait times conform to the requirements of the paying entity. (Proving discrimination can result in heavy fines to the medical institution.)
- Scheduling ambulatory surgery at a date that is too far in the future, which can result in patient cancellation.
Five hospitals of the Assuta Medical Centers have been using an innovative system for assigning patients to operating rooms. The system addresses the above risks and provides reliable analysis of data. The novel system checks all the resources needed to perform the medical procedure (equipment, staff, items such as pacemakers, implants, etc.), and reserves the resources for the surgery being scheduled – or alternatively alerts the person making the reservation that a resource needed for the surgery is not available. In parallel, when a patient is scheduled for a surgical procedure, the system performs checks whether the attending surgeon is authorized by the paying entity to perform the procedure at the given institution.
The system enables data retrieval in every possible cross-section about patient wait times for surgery – according to segmentation by geographic areas, branches, medical procedures, surgeons, paying entities, and more. This type of data retrieval enables management to perform optimal load balancing between the various branches within the organization, and at the same time meets marketing and regulatory requirements.