Sterile processing departments (SPDs) everywhere are struggling to do more with less. While they’re getting an increasingly larger load of responsibilities, they’re also having difficulty finding and retaining qualified employees to manage those tasks.
It can be difficult to quantify and share these challenges with hospital administration or other departments. If you have an instrument tracking system, the data around these common challenges already exists, but it takes a long time to find and visualize in an effective way.
Having the ability to quickly and easily see how and when work is complete is critical. It enables SPD leaders to communicate their needs more effectively with other departments and hospital administrators and use data to show what’s happening in their departments. They can also use it to begin identifying and implementing departmental improvements, holding technicians and managers accountable to their goals, and tracking key performance indicators for their work to drive operational excellence.
With CensisAI2 Productivity, you now have a way to turn the data you’re already collecting with CensiTrac into actionable insights that will enable sterile processing teams to analyze how they’re spending time in their departments, discover patterns hidden in their data, and streamline operations to achieve their department goals.
Let’s dive in and explore how better visualizing sterile processing productivity will help optimize SPD resources.
Making Sense of Sterile Processing Productivity Numbers
With the right data in place, you can get a full view of everything that goes on in your sterile processing department. Once you visualize and understand what’s happening, you can use the data to improve processes and people to maximize your procedure volume and ensure you’re operating at peak capacity.
So, what are some of the SPD productivity numbers you should focus on to increase throughput without hiring more FTEs and reduce overtime and burnout among current staff?
Processing Speed
It’s not just how many trays you can do in a day. Some trays have a lot of tools, some may have fewer. Understanding both tray speed and volume will help your team prioritize shift tasks and quickly see where team members may need additional training or support to maximize their production.
This data is already tracked in CensiTrac. With CensisAI2 Productivity this data is visualized in an interactive platform so you can uncover patterns and define true KPIs that will set your team up for success.
Staff Turnover
New techs work slower. And they should! You want to make sure the job is done right. But if you’re working in a department with a lot of churn, you can use productivity data to better plan capacity and workload. You won’t be able to hit the same numbers if you’re simultaneously ramping up new staff members.
CensisAI2 Productivity gives you the ability to compare tech-to-tech, shift-to-shift, and site-to-site data, so you can understand if your department has a higher-than-average churn rate for example. With this data in hand, you can start to dig deeper into some of the ways you can prevent this to ensure your staff can continue to perform at a high capacity.
Bottlenecks
Are there some steps that are constantly needing to be redone? Others that take far longer to complete than you would have expected? Or is your staff being called away to collect instruments, stopping them from the sterilization process and reducing the overall throughput of your department?
With accurate data on hand, you’ll be able to uncover where issues may be occurring in your processes and take steps to address them.
Successes
Finding and acting on actionable insights isn’t just about uncovering problems. Having an interactive data platform is a great way to track wins and the effectiveness of initiatives. With the data visualized, you can dig in to find out why a team member is exceeding KPIs. Or you can track how a specific initiative is impacting your work.
Use CensisAI2 Productivity to go beyond tracking what happened and dig into the data to see how it happened, and why, and find ways to replicate your success.
Not Just Another Dashboard
Companies around the world are inundated with dashboards and data. In fact, 74% of companies report that they want to be data-driven, but only 29% say they’re able to actually connect data with insights.
The good news is that CensisAI2 Productivity isn’t just another dashboard. With pre-built tools for daily visual management, CensisAI2 Productivity allows you to harness the data collected in an instrument tracking system, like CensiTrac. With interactive dashboards to drill-down into your data, you’ll have easy access to the insights you need to justify budget requests, help with forecasting and planning, improve department processes, better manage team members and their productivity, and communicate more effectively and efficiently with other departments.
The data will show historical trends and give you the information you need to have the right conversations to move your department forward.
Ready to get started?
Get in touch with Censis today to find out how your team can use CensisAI2 Productivity with CensiTrac to begin visualizing sterile processing productivity and ensure your teams have actionable insights to make better, data-driven decisions.
