Headquartered in Birmingham, Ala., Birmingham Surgical PC (BSPC) is a general surgery group practice with five surgeons who practice at four different surgical locations, representing a weekly volume of 75 cases. These cases were organized by four nurse schedulers, one at each office.

Juggling Routine

BSPC surgical scheduling tasks were, at best, cumbersome and, at worst, a financial drain on the small surgical group. Nurse schedulers were armed with only a primitive desktop scheduling tool that relied on Excel. Each day, they would receive multiple phone calls or would meet with the surgeons to review daily surgical schedules. The nurse schedulers had to manually juggle and analyze a variety of data, with the ultimate goal of identifying each surgeon’s availability to leverage their time and resources.

An audit of nurse schedulers’ time revealed that they were spending, on average, 35 hours a month on non productive scheduling tasks, which led to increased personnel costs. BSPC also wanted to leverage the five surgeons’ time better. It was important to co ordinate surgeons’ schedules to make them available to assist one another, or they would need to hire a surgical assistant at a cost to the surgical group of about $500 per surgery.

Scheduling Central

BSPC adopted WebScheduler Surgical Group Scheduler (SGS-35) from WebScheduler LLC in Lafayette, Calif. The customizable Web and PDA-accessible practice management offering allows BSPC to streamline not just scheduling, but also surgical assists, surgical consults, rounding lists, vacation, conferences and call schedules.

The initial implementation was launched in August 2002, and within a month, BSPC was using the SGS-35 Calendar component exclusively. It was not long before the schedulers became adept at the intuitive procedures to post additions and changes to the BSPC Calendar-so comfortable that several enhancements soon were added, especially in the area of reporting, because nurse schedulers saw additional opportunities to improve the organization’s results.

Cost criterion was met with a minimum upfront, first-year investment: an initial $300 licensing fee and a quarterly $750 fee for a total first-year investment of $3,300. (The normal licensing fee, depending on the size of the practice, ranges from $500 to $1,500, but was reduced for BSPC since it was the first to use the WebScheduler technology in the Surgical Group Scheduler configuration.)

With all scheduling tasks centralized now, nurse schedulers’ time has been reduced, and there is no longer the need to drive from location to location to keep the schedules current. Based on original projections, BSPC reduced nurse schedulers’ unproductive time by 35 hours a month-in effect, eliminating all of the unproductive hours first noted in its audit. At $18 an hour, this represents an annual savings of $7,560 for a nurse scheduler’s time.

BSPC dramatically exceeded its own objectives in better leveraging surgeons’ time and schedules so they can assist each other in surgery, rather than incurring costs for surgical assistants. Instead of the 10 percent reduction in using surgical assistants originally targeted, BSPC achieved almost a 30 percent reduction. This means that BSPC was able to arrange its surgeons’ schedules so they can assist one another an average of 25 surgeries out of 75 surgeries per month. At a $500-per-case surgical assist fee, this represents $12,500 per month in savings, or $150,000 in savings annually. In just the first year, with a total investment of $3,300, BSPC added an extra $150,000 in gross charges, or a gross ROI of 45 times its investment.