Preoperative assessments often rely on outdated, manual processes that take significant staff resources and fail to consistently optimize patients. Pre-admission testing (PAT) teams are overwhelmed with administrative tasks and manual screening workflows that consume up to 50% of their time, leaving less time for patient care. Ensuring patients are as prepared as possible for surgery is critical to achieving optimal outcomes and avoiding last-minute cancellations.
For orthopedic joint surgeons, the goal is clear: restore mobility, alleviate pain, and give patients their lives back. The journey to a successful joint replacement is often a long one, culminating in a surgery whose success relies heavily on thorough patient preparation. To date, this process is commonly time consuming, inefficient, and places significant, undue administrative burden on our clinical care team members.
The Hidden Costs of Outdated Preoperative Processes
Many orthopedic programs grapple with outdated PAT processes that create significant challenges for both patients and providers:
- Last-Minute Scrambles: Imagine a patient, already nervous about their upcoming surgery, still navigating a maze of tests and clearances. Traditional PAT workflows commonly involve contacting patients only 3-5 days before surgery, leaving a tiny window for assessment and crucial optimization. This narrow time frame between PAT assessment and surgery date is a recipe for a case delay, poorly optimized patients, or a poor surgical outcome.
- Time-Consuming Manual Workflows: The burden of manual screening, scheduling, and administrative tasks is immense. Nurses spend significant time reviewing patient records and tracking down missing information to prepare for a screening call, and often don’t even get the patient on the phone. These administrative tasks can consume up to 50% of a PAT nurse’s valuable time, diverting focus from direct patient care and contributing to burnout.
- Avoidable Cancellations: This inefficiency has a tangible cost: unnecessary surgery cancellations that waste precious operating room time, disrupt schedules, and delay patient care.
- Unpredictability and Stress: For orthopedic surgeons, the unpredictability of patient readiness adds significant stress, impacting schedule reliability and potentially affecting work-life balance.
These challenges don’t just affect workflows; they directly impact patient safety, recovery, and the financial health of the practice.
Unlocking Efficiency: How AI-Driven Perioperative Care Coordination Transforms Your Orthopedic Practice
AI-powered solutions are fundamentally transforming how orthopedic programs prepare patients for surgery. Qventus’ Perioperative Care Coordination deploys a suite of AI Teammates to automate manual processes, improve efficiency, and reduce administrative burden – delivering powerful benefits for surgeons, staff, and patients alike. Here’s how it works:
PAT Workflow Support: Our AI Assistants help nurses prepare for, conduct, and follow-up from PAT phone calls by providing scheduling support, requesting medical records, and taking EHR notes. This means PAT nurses don’t have to spend hours tracking down documents or reviewing charts – the AI Assistants can tackle those tasks. The assistants can also confirm patient availability prior to the nurse making the call, so nurses don’t do all of the prep work only to find themselves getting a patient’s voicemail.
Continuous Risk Determination: Qventus leverages AI-driven risk stratification to identify high-risk patients as soon as their surgery is scheduled, not just days before. Flagging high-risk patients earlier, and ensuring they are prioritized by PAT staff, ensures that the patients can be optimized with enough time to spare before surgery. And it’s not just a point-in-time risk evaluation. The solution continuously analyzes the latest EHR data, chart reviews, and patient conversations to flag any new risks as soon as they arise.
Patient Concierge: The AI patient concierge can contact patients directly via voice, text, and email to gather intakes, coordinate appointments, answer patient questions, and track follow-up items. This ensures clear communication with patients and helps them better prepare for surgery. It also allows the patient to engage on their own time, rather than hoping a patient is available whenever a PAT nurse calls, because the AI Assistants are available 24/7.
Patient Optimization: Our AI Assistants can identify and coordinate wraparound care opportunities pre- and post-surgery to ensure patients are fully optimized. For example, if the patient is a smoker, the AI can remind the PAT nurse to discuss smoking cessation programs, and help enroll the patient if desired. This ensures higher quality care and helps patients prepare for and recover from surgery better.
The Impact of AI-Driven Perioperative Care Coordination
Reducing Cancellations. By identifying high-risk patients earlier and ensuring every patient receives necessary optimization information, the solution drives up to a 40% reduction in avoidable 72 hour cancellations.
Driving Superior Outcomes. When patients are well-optimized for surgery, they experience better outcomes. By streamlining the PAT process, you set your patients up for the best chance for optimal outcomes and ensure your program exceeds CMS quality benchmarks. Comprehensive PAT preparation, central to Qventus’ PCC solution, directly influences key CMS metrics like readmission rates, complication rates, patient satisfaction, and overall surgical success.
Boosting Institutional Financial Performance. The operational benefits of streamlined preoperative care directly translate to significant financial gains. Programs can realize up to $10M+ ROI per 100 ORs for optimizing patients pre- and post-surgery. More reliable, predictable scheduling and fewer cancellations lead to an increase in case volume. In addition, identifying and coordinating wraparound care opportunities helps the health system capture more billable patient optimization opportunities.
On the flip side, streamlining preoperative care helps reduce cost and utilize resources more efficiently. Nurses are able to be much more productive, and allows your program to scale much more without bringing on additional staff. It also significantly reduces costs associated with day-of cancellations and emergency rescheduling, which are expensive drains on resources.
The Bottom Line: Precision in Preparation, Power in Practice
The Perioperative Care Coordination Solution is designed to eliminate administrative burdens through intelligent automation. It guides patients through their entire preoperative journey, automates routine tasks to free your staff to operate at the top of their license, and ensures joint replacement patients arrive fully optimized for successful procedures. This allows your practice to focus on high-value strategic growth rather than administrative firefighting.
Efficient preoperative assessment directly impacts your practice’s clinical and financial success. By implementing AI-driven PAT solutions, you can significantly reduce cancellations, optimize more patients, and increase throughput – resulting in more successful joint replacements, higher patient satisfaction, and stronger practice performance.
Ready to transform your orthopedic practice and set a new standard for patient care? Contact us today.
