During the development of the OHA guidebook Optimizing your Perioperative Supply Chain, one topic of discussion was the procedure card.
Clinicians tend to use ‘preference cards’ as they contain specifics related to a surgeon’s preferences, resulting in many cards. Having many preference cards creates complexity to the process/system and challenges for training and maintenance of the information.
Procedure cards used effectively can help product standardization efforts, yield cost savings, and even improve staff satisfaction.
Clearing out redundant cards
When Bluewater Health in Sarnia undertook a procedure card management improvement project as a participant in the OHA’s pilot operating room supply chain project, it reduced the 1,200 cards in its system to 900. Much of that was refining the content, clearing out redundancies and trying to standardize where possible.
Having a system laden with dated procedure cards is not uncommon as many systems haven’t completed a thorough optimization of these files since they were digitized in the late 1990s.
In some hospitals, procedure cards are part of more sophisticated supply chain software and in others they are little more than manual Kardex cards, but what they often have in common is the sheer volume and inaccuracy of the cards.
Aiming to minimize the difference
Inaccuracy makes clinicians opt for the more specific preference card, but if the aim is to minimize the difference and have appropriate supplies, it’s time to build better procedure cards. To accommodate preferences, use surgeon specific requests that can be associated with the procedure booking.
Building better procedure cards is one of the four foundational projects discussed in the OHA guidebook Optimizing your Perioperative Supply Chain.
To learn more about how to assess your procedure cards, review procedure codes, measure product usage rates, define what your new cards will require and manage an ongoing maintenance plan to sustain this change, click here.