Improve Efficiency & Productivity while Reducing Risk

Imagine if every time a surgeon walked into surgery the room was setup to his or her exact specifications. With all the equipment and instrumentation readily available there is no need to waste time searching for a forgotten instrument. Faster setup, faster cases, faster turnaround times allows more cases to be performed each day. Standardization of case preparation lowers the margin of medical errors meaning fewer chances of medical malpractice. Nurses and techs will perform better when they are confident in their case preparation. Efficient setup of the OR will improve the quality of care with less risks and more reward.

Physician Satsifaction

Each physician performs surgery in a unique fashion. O.R. PEER allows physicians to standardize their specific orders for each case so that the case can be set up perfectly each time by any nurse or tech. O.R. PEER's 3D interface is medically intuitive, easy to use and makes effective use of video, image and text content to streamline workflow. Physicians can schedule their cases more efficiently and complete their case more effectively.

Reduce Medical Errors

In November, 1999, the Committee on the Quality of Care in America produced a report entitled "To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System." This report revealed a quality crisis, stating that 98,000 hospital deaths each year are related to preventable medical errors. It has been estimated that up to 1 million medical errors occur in U.S. hospitals every year. Of these, 50% are very serious, resulting in what are known as adverse events or adverse drug events, and 20% are potentially fatal. It is estimated that medical errors result in approximately $29 billion in excess health care expenditures and productivity loss each year (To Err is Human, p. 43). HIMSS released a white paper entitled “A Technological Approach to Enhancing Patient Safety” which contends that preventable medical errors account for 12% to 15% of hospital costs. O.R. PEER reduces medical errors by standardizing processes, procedures and workflow. With a quick and easy resource to access, your staff can find any answer within a few mouse clicks.

Education, Competency Quizzes and CEU Tracking

O.R. PEER allows educators to easily develop lesson plans complete with competency quizzes to track Continuing Education Units. Our database can even send you custom reminders when your staff needs to complete re-occurring training or certifications.

Travelers
It is estimated that 20% of a hospital’s nursing staff budget is for traveling nurses. These nurses are competent and skilled, but unfamiliar with your hospital's practices. Medical Nomenclature varies by hospital and by physician. O.R. PEER helps travelers provide the best quality of care by offering them a resource to familiarize themselves with the expectations of physicians at your facility.

Retiring Nurses

As the baby-boomer generation begins to retire you will need to document their experiences and best practices to pass on to their successors. O.R. PEER is an easy-to-use tool to facilitate the knowledge transfer by documenting workflow processes and troubleshooting solutions and tips from experience.

Patient Safety

Preventable adverse events are a leading cause of death in the United States. Deaths due to preventable adverse events exceed the deaths attributable to motor vehicle accidents and breast cancer (about 45,000 each) or AIDS (about 17,000). A 2000–2002 study of the Medicare population by the HealthGrades Patient Safety group reported that about 1.14 million patient safety incidents occurred among the 37 million hospitalizations. Of the total 323,993 deaths among Medicare patients who developed one or more patient-safety incidents in those years, 263,864 (81%) of these deaths were directly attributable to the incidents. Overall, the best performing hospitals (hospitals that had the lowest overall patient safety incident rates of all hospitals studied, defined as the top 7.5% of all hospitals studied) had five fewer deaths per 1000 hospitalizations compared to the bottom 10th percentile of hospitals. This significant mortality difference is attributable to fewer patient safety incidents at the best performing hospitals. Fewer patient safety incidents in the best performing hospitals resulted in a lower cost of $740,337 per 1,000 hospitalizations as compared to the bottom 10th percentile of hospitals. O.R. PEER improves patient safety by standardizing process and workflow.

Young Nurses

Generation X and Y nurses are more experienced with using information systems and will find O.R. PEER intuitive and useful for quickly accessing specific information. Instead of bothering an already busy nurse, they can independently consult O.R. PEER for quick answers.

Recruiting and Retention

Hospitals that adopt new information technologies to enhance job efficiency, reduce medical errors and enable nurses to concentrate more time on direct patient care have the upper hand in recruiting and retaining registered nurses, according to a report published in 2002 by the California HealthCare Foundation and First Consulting Group. The report found that the advantages enjoyed by technology-oriented hospitals will only increase as nursing school graduates enter the workforce better trained in technology and with high expectations that their employers will have IT systems in place to support them on the job. People will stay in jobs where they feel confident, comfortable and appreciated. O.R. PEER reduces turnover by increasing job satisfaction and reducing case preparation anxiety.

Nursing Shortage

84% of Hospitals across the country have reported a shortage of qualified nurses.
The available nurses are often over worked and expected to fulfill multiple job duties. With hundreds of procedures and dozens of physicians to work with it would be difficult for anyone to remember every detail in the workflow process. O.R. PEER aids nurses and techs by providing quick and easy access to critical information. When nurses and techs are properly prepared, procedures run smoothly and efficiently. There may not be enough nurses to run your OR at capacity, but you can run the rooms you have with better efficiency and quality of care using O.R. PEER.

Training and Orientation

Training is often too vague, not providing incoming staff with the information they need to satisfy an individual surgeon's desires. Preference cards and Pick Sheets can be brief, disorganized, and difficult to read. Training is often too vague, not providing incoming staff with the information they need to satisfy individual surgeon's desires. O.R. PEER allows nurses and techs to access the complete and accurate information that they need to be independently prepared for surgery at your hospital.

Reduce Inventory Waste

Each year hospitals lose money on inventory that is never used. Surgeons want more supplies available than they intend to use in the event that the procedure requires special consideration. O.R. PEER can reduce inventory waste by informing your staff which instruments and supplies are to be opened in setup and which are PULL/HOLD.

Satisfaction Surveys

O.R. PEER gives you the ability to administer surveys to capture comments from your nurses and physicians about how their case went. These surveys allow them to report equipment, work flow and personnel issues quickly. Data is collected in a secure database for fast retrieval and analysis by managers and directors.