Fujitsu And Baptist Health South Florida Transform Operating Room Scheduling With Newly Launched Solution

Fujitsu announced the launch of an innovative solution to its Uvance Healthy Living portfolio to transform surgical capacity utilization with a new approach in the market by targeting the root cause of surgical block time inefficiencies.

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Fujitsu’s Surgical Capacity Optimization, refined and improved in intensive field trials through a collaboration with Baptist Health Doctors Hospital and Baptist Health Innovations, offers perioperative executives in hospitals access to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application powered by Fujitsu’s Digital Annealer, a unique quantum-inspired computing technology built for solving complex optimization problems.

Elegant and easy-to-use as a sophisticated decision support assistant, the solution creates highly tailored, mathematically validated recommendations to change up block time allocation in operating room (OR) schedules, and in doing so, uncovers net new OR time, empowering surgical services leaders to more effectively collaborate with all key stakeholders to improve utilization and case volume. It also includes an innovative generative block scheduling wizard for what-if? analysis, giving teams clear projections for hypothetical scheduling scenarios in advance. Now surgical services leaders can evaluate more scheduling options than ever before with unprecedented accuracy and be confident they’re making the right decisions to optimize performance.

Details of successful trials with Baptist Health Doctors Hospital will be presented at the solution’s launch at OR Manager Conference on September 19th in Nashville, Tennessee. In addition to immediate rollout in North America, the solution is also being made available on a controlled basis in Asia Pacific and European regions.

With the new solution, Fujitsu aims to improve people’s wellbeing and create a world that enriches the life experience of everyone in alignment with its vision for Fujitsu Uvance.

Revolutionizing utilization with intelligent recommendations

A core feature of the solution is the Recommendation Engine. Powered by a hospital’s surgical scheduling data from its electronic health records system (EHR), it identifies patterns in block utilization over time and uses this data to make intelligent scheduling recommendations that give individual surgeons the right volume and distribution of block-time to match their demand.

These iterative and scalable scheduling recommendations, tailored down to individual surgeons, empower perioperative executives with the data needed to improve operating room utilization, discover underutilized capacity, enhance surgical services productivity, and ultimately transform perioperative services.

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Dr. Barry Katzen, Chief Medical Innovation Officer at Baptist Health stated, “Fujitsu’s solution challenges the conventional way of managing OR utilization. It targets the root cause, not the symptoms, revolutionizing OR schedules to yield the best outcome for both hospitals and patients. It also gives perioperative teams solid, easily-accessed data to support change, so that by the time they propose re-organizing schedules, or have to negotiate difficult conversations with providers, they have total confidence they’re doing what’s right.”

Uncovering net new operating time

Fujitsu’s Surgical Capacity Optimization sets itself apart by uncovering net new operating room time to accommodate increased case volume. It analyzes historical and forecast data using advanced optimization, and right sizes block schedules through generative block design, identifying entirely new prime time operating hours and days.

In trials at Baptist Health Doctors Hospital across 14 operating rooms, the solution delivered a 37% improvement in available prime-time minutes over a three-month period, amounting to 231 new full-day blocks within the existing OR infrastructure.

“The additional prime time OR capacity we uncovered using the solution’s recommendations will greatly enhance our performance-driven revenue potential in surgical services, while always prioritizing patient care,” said Javier Hernandez-Lichtl, CEO of Doctors Hospital. He added, “Being able to predict and manage our surgical capacity with this level of precision is transformative and will help us improve the fiscal performance of the surgical discipline.”

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