OpFlow’s optimization solution is rooted in deep clinical expertise and focused on improving the surgical process and supply chain. Two of the three founders are practicing surgeons and the thirds is a healthcare technology expert. Creating efficiency without change the practice of the surgeon or affecting OR staff is a complex problem to solve. Inherently there is fear and risk in changing anything within a surgical procedure. Fear of change has stagnated innovation in the surgical supply chain efficiency until now when empirical data is collected and analyzed to support change.
OpFlow’s process rely’s on perioperative collection of instrument usage data along with validation steps performed during cases. Collecting usage by instrument by surgeon by procedure enables identification of low or no use instruments to be targeted for reduction. Layer in national benchmarks will allow comparisons of usage data for the same procedure with peers across the country. With procedure specific usage along with benchmark OpFlow’s engine builds “proposed” tray definitions that are validated perioperatively to ensure any site-specific needs are satisfied. These steps produce a culture of change that enables OpFlow to reduce over 30% of instruments from trays.
Complexities within how trays and supplies are used across procedures has also slowed the innovation within the surgical supply chain. Trays are shared across service lines and procedures and the instruments on those trays can be sourced from multiple vendors making comparisons between trays very hard. OpFlow has built a procedure hierarchy that maps procedures to an OpFlow procedure group and has mapped instrument to OpFlow instrument groups that allows comparisons between tray internally and to benchmarks. Lastly the complexity in procedure mix that use the tray can vary by site within a systema and across systems. OpFlow’s engine allows procedure mix to tray modeling to account for the unique configurations at each site within our benchmarks.
By solving the complexities of change within the surgical supply chain not only creating greater efficiency it saves significant money for each implementation. Savings are produced in capital expense cost avoidance in which the instruments that are removed from trays are re-allocated to new trays saving on instrument purchases. With the average cost to purchase new stainless instruments at $142 per instrument and Onflow’s ability to reduce thousands of instruments the payback is very strong. Operational efficiencies produce savings for less instruments to be sterilized. The average cost per instrument to sterilize is around $.85. OpFlow’s process yields hundreds of thousands of instruments that don’t need to be processed annually. Savings between the two hard dollar metrics typically mean an ROI of 2-3 times the cost to implement the solution.