Development of a Tailored Tool for the Optimization of the Surgery Sessions

During the last few years many Six Sigma applications in Healthcare have been made, in particular in North America. The results obtained have shown the importance of the use of a structured approach, such as Six Sigma, to increase hospital quality performance. In this paper the Six Sigma approach is used to improve the occupation index and to reduce the costs connected with the surgery block of a hospital. In particular the attention is on the surgery session which is composed of a planned case mix of surgeries. In fact the session uses a high level of resources (temporal resources, human resources, material resources and economical resources) and it appears as one of the most critical processes in the hospital system. Usually this kind of process is affected by a large and random variability due to the predominance of human factors caused by both the patients and the health staff. This variability is necessary to the process but causes a coupled process flow. Through the use of Six Sigma and Axiomatic Design a tailored tool that is useful for the measurement, control, and planning of the surgery session has been developed. This tool is based on the estimation of the duration and the costs of each surgery. In this way it is possible to identify the best, sustainable case mix in the planning phase. The case mix is defined for each surgery session and it is based on Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG), the doctor’s capability and surgery difficulties. The result obtained with the proposed approach is an accurate planning of the surgery session, a higher efficiency level and a general empowerment of health staff and consequently an important reduction in costs.