Dan DeLay
Senior Vice President, Supply Chain Analytics, VHA Inc.
On my last business trip, I fell prey to the typical summer travel woes such as weather delays, crowded planes and long security lines. However, it got me thinking.
The airline industry isn’t that much different from health care. They perform different functions – one transports people safely from one place to another and one makes sick people well. Yet they have many similarities:
- Both are highly regulated industries that are responsible for taking care of people and making sure they provide a healthy and safe environment for customers.
- In both industries, if you make a mistake the result can be disastrous.
- Both are looking for ways to improve efficiency to lower costs and improve customer service.
In an effort to reduce errors (and improve safety), the airline industry has developed infrastructure to support and track everything in real-time. Hospitals are starting to adopt a similar approach – not only to improve utilization and decrease costs, but also to identify best practices. For example, one firm, has developed software tools that help quantify variations in physicians’ approaches to surgical procedures in order to identify best practices, as well as opportunities to improve quality and decrease supply waste. To date, these tools have been installed primarily in hospital operating rooms and cardiac catheterization labs to enable staff members to quantify and compare clinical and economical variations in clinical care. However, they are also starting to be used in orthopedic and spinal procedures as well.
The health care industry must focus on developing a minute-by-minute approach to efficiency if the industry is going to squeeze the most out of the dollars that are spent. These tools provide physicians with the data they need to understand how procedures are being performed so they can begin to identify opportunities to create efficiencies and identify best practices. To paraphrase Eastern Airlines’ old slogan, hospitals need to take care of the details to make sure our patients receive the best case possible because “we have to earn our wings every day.”
