Data-Driven Surgical Tray Optimization to Improve Operating Room Efficiency

Improving Operating Room Efficiency After each surgery in a hospital, every reusable instrument that has entered the operating room must be sterilized before it can be used again. Hospitals spend several million dollars a year on this sterilization process, instrument tray assembly, and instrument repurchase costs. However, 70%–80% of instruments that enter the operating room are not used at a large majority of hospitals resulting in wastage of millions of dollars. For a medium-sized hospital, approximately $4–$7 million are spent on the sterilization process. Across more than 5,000 hospitals in the United States, several billion dollars per year are wasted on unnecessary sterilization. Researchers at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, with partners from healthcare technology firm Operative Flow Technologies, have developed an algorithm that uses detailed data of instruments used to create optimized instrument tray configuration. The algorithm creates trays informed by historical usage of instruments to reduce unused instruments in trays significantly. This algorithm scales for hundreds of trays, thousands of instruments, and thousands of surgeries and can be applied to major healthcare systems. At one implementation, the number of unused instruments was reduced by 54%. Their solution has subsequently been implemented at multiple healthcare systems leading to several million dollars of cost savings for the hospitals.