Funding New SPD Efforts with Capital Expenditure Savings Produced by OpFlow

OpFlow has a wide-reaching impact on multiple facets of the surgical services process. There are benefits related to labor and personnel, SPD and OR capacity, reduction of capital expenditure, increased efficiency and OR utilization, as well as improved quality and safety through mitigation of citation risks and adherence to regulatory requirements.

For the purposes of this post, we will focus on how the process improvements and cost savings from OpFlow instrument tray rationalization and consolidation enable the funding of SPD quality and standardization efforts.

A prevailing commonality among hospitals is a large annual budget allotment (typically $2-3 million) for expenses related to surgical instrumentation. We have found that the majority of those funds are spent on replacing lost or damaged instruments, as well as to satisfy the steadily increasing perceived need for additional instrument trays. With OpFlow’s data-driven approach based on actual instrument usage, there is an average reduction of at least 35% of the instruments on commonly used trays. That directly translates into a reduction of instrumentation-associated expenses. The hospital therefore has a dramatically reduced need for instrument purchase, along with increased inventory generated through the identified instrument surplus, providing the opportunity to redefine that budget line item.

The cost savings rendered by OpFlow through a reduction (rationalization) of instrument tray contents and consolidation of redundant instrument trays provide a hospital the opportunity to reallocate the funds previously directed toward instrument repurchase to fund improvement initiatives for central/sterile processing instead. This turns a once vicious cycle of increasing instrumentation and backlogged sterile processing into a now virtuous cycle in which there are fewer instruments to process and funds made available to improve processes within the SPD that will continue to improve efficiency and workflow within the surgical services department.