Challenges surrounding Perioperative Operations

Ruben J. Azocar currently serves as a Vice President for Perioperative services at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is responsible for handling all the operations and facilitating cases that come into the scheduled time. In addition, he has been working to deliver the highest standard of care to the patients keeping quality, safety and compliance on track. In his current role, he is also responsible for managing the perioperative finances and the value analysis team within the institution in ac collaborative manner with other stakeholders.

What are potential challenges or pain points prevailing in the market today?

From the operational perspective, the biggest challenge that we face is staffing. Institutions across the country are facing this staffing crisis, which adds to the issue of limited hospital capacity. Hospitalsstill have small but lingering numbers of COVID patients and are still experiencing challenges placing patients into acute care facilities once ready to be discharged.To summarize, these two challenges of staffing and hospital capacity are immensely prevailing in the market in the current day.

What are the Safety Initiatives that you have in Place?

We focus on putting teams together to execute quality and safety. This includes drills for the entire care team, which helped us strengthen our culture, quality, safety and protocols.

BIDMC’s Board of Directors formally voted to support two audacious, long-term goals for improving the quality and safety of care for our patients in December of 2007. The first is to eliminate preventable harm, both physical and emotional, at BIDMC and the second is to achieve patients satisfactions that place us among the top 2 percent of hospitals. Each year, in conjunction with the Annual Operational Planning, BIDMC sets out its priorities for improvement in quality and patient safety. These Priorities establish the framework for specific efforts across the Medical Center, and many reflect ongoing multi-year efforts.

Please mention any project you are currently working on and the kinds of technology or any latest strategies you're leveraging.

Through our EMR, we are tracking first cases of the day to determine whether they are starting on time and looking at turnover time. On the later, we areplanning to have a pilot with the spine surgery team for various reasons. One, it is a very motivated team, and two is the same type of surgery instrumentation which facilitates standaritation.Number 3 is that if we were able to do an additional case every day because with better turnover times, those cases bring a more considerable contribution margin, so it will make sense financially to be able to help that group. We have also invested in our robotic surgery and acquired a couple of new robots last year. With robotics, there are various services that we can provide surgical care with this state of the art technology. Those include but are not limited to urology, GYN, Colorectal, Thoracic, General Surgery   ENT etc.BIDMC is set to become a leader in Robotic Surgery with the acquisition of these equipment and theoutstanding robotic surgeons we have on staff.

A piece of advice for your fellow peers

In terms of compensation, it is important thatthe team's salaries are comparable at current market rates. However, compensation is not everything, but make sure that leardeshiop  keeps on strengthening the purpose, the sense of teamwork, and the sense of belonging across your teams. People stay because of the culture, the sense of being recognized, purpose, and loyalty toward its institution. That can never be lost or fade away.