5 1
N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 5 | O U T P A T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T
If you're a
smaller special-
ty ASC, you
may already
have a similar
model in place.
However, in
our large, mul-
tispecialty
facility, we
chose to incor-
porate a
focused factory
model for spe-
cific surgeries and patients, while also making room for individual-
ized care in more complex cases. Now, many of our surgical servic-
es use this approach, and we've seen big benefits like cost savings,
decreased length of stay and better outcomes in our high-volume
areas, including cardiac, joint replacement and colorectal surgeries.
Assembly line
When adopting this approach, we targeted one surgical specialty at a
time to ensure that our mini-factories fit within our hospital's larger
"solution shop" care model, which uses a traditional approach to treat-
ing patients. We followed 6 key steps, regardless of the specialty we
were looking at.
1. Identify patients and specialties. One of the most important steps in
creating a focused factory is choosing which specialties to focus on
and determining which patients can be treated using a standard path-
way. In a small, single-specialty ASC, this is probably already deter-
Mayo
Clinic
z CHECK-UPS Sarah Grota, APRN, CNP, Glen Au, RN, CCRN, and Erica Wittwer,
MD, PhD, make rounds at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. The group makes
up a part of the clinic's "focused factory" in its cardiac surgery department.
