Hospital Operating Room Utilization

This chapter illustrates a dashboard showing how efficiently hospital operating rooms (ORs) are being scheduled and utilized. This hospital OR utilization dashboard displays surgical case and OR information in a clear and easy-to-understand way and helps OR managers, staff, surgeons, and anesthesiologists identify potential opportunities for improvement. The metrics included in this dashboard help viewers to compare the accuracy of the amount of time projected for an operation against the actual time it takes to perform. The ability to break down each OR by day (the Gantt bars in the dashboard) shows the problems in detail. A calendar view and heat map works on this dashboard in order to satisfy the design objectives. In the calendar view, one can move the day of the month up to the top left corner of each day and use a smaller font so that it would not interfere with the data in each cell.