From the March 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Siemens’ Kulkarni says a problem they found is that surgeons or staff sometimes don’t take the time to train on the new devices before scheduling their first cases, often because the hospital is eager to start seeing revenue from the new room. But he says his company – like many others – is working to make hybrid OR equipment training more robust.
“What we did after we got those KLAS reports, we’ve increased the amount of training that we give to each hospital,” he says. The company now offers more than 120 hours of training. Also, it asks customers to slot a brief pre-procedure training period.
“We also request, and we can only request time and again, not to schedule cases the first week, so that the surgeon can spend some time, and the staff can spend some time learning how the system works,” Kulkarni says.
For staff, training can be quite involved. Toshiba offers a one-week training course at its facility in Irvine, Calif., where customers can practice on two fully functioning systems and some workstations. Typically, customers send two people, often techs but also doctors, per system purchased. After the training on campus, Toshiba then sends people to the hospital and gives them in-location training for another week. Then about a month or so later, after they’ve had a time to test out the system, Toshiba comes back for a follow-up session. “They’re not doing their regular job, they’re focused on learning,” Berthe says.
There are other staff issues, too. For many hospitals, staff rotates from operating room to operating room. The problem is that a staff might only work in the hybrid OR once every month or two, making it hard to get familiar with the equipment, which is why Kulkarni recommends a dedicated staff for hybrid ORs.
“It’s so damned complicated that you really need to have a dedicated staff,” Dr. Michael Friebe, a professor at Munich Technical University who used to work in the imaging equipment industry, tells DOTmed News. “Two or three people who really know everything perfectly, otherwise the whole OR is not usable.”
Even so, everyone has to be on board. Dr. Lumsden says it’s important to “cross-train.” as the rooms typically run 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Even if you have a dedicated staff, they might not be on the night shift when you have a case coming in.
“You’re going to be dealing with whoever happens to be in the nursing team and the imaging team who are available at that time,” he says. “It’s nice to have a dedicated team, but they have to (cross-train the) nursing pool.”
A Skytron-Philips installation.
(Credit:Skytron)
The universal room
For all their challenges, KLAS’ Ising is bullish on hybrid ORs. “I would anticipate most hospitals having one in a few years,” he says. “It’s just growing pains. It’s very new and different from what they’ve been doing.” He says KLAS is doing more research in the next six or seven months to see how the market’s changing.
