CRNA hours billed vs time present in Actual Schedule

CRNA hours billed vs time present in Optimized Schedule

Each row represents an individual CRNA.  If over half of each time unit (10 minutes) is billable on an anesthesia record, then it is red.  Less than half is yellow. Exactly half is green. Lines that are all yellow belong to  L&D coverage and should be ignored.

The top graph is actual time from the same day for all the other graphs on this months blog.  Notice the large amount of yellow at both the beginning and end of most of the lines (draw your own conclusion).  There are a few runs of yellow in the middle of the graph, also.

The bottom graph is from the theoretical optimized-for-surgeon schedule in the prior blog posts. The yellow (and non-colored squares since there was no time sheet input for the theoretical graph) represent the financial hit that the anesthesia group takes when trying to minimize the surgeons’ turnover.  There’s a trade-off between the surgeon and anesthesiologist depending on whose time has higher priority.  However, even when giving priority to the surgeon, this graph shows the anesthesia group expenses (and those of the hospital) are no worse with this scheduling algorithm.  This graph also includes 10 hours of surgical time (moved forward from midnight on the actual time) that could not be show on the top graph.  For a different view of this last graph’s data, (and a nice way to hand out the days schedule to the CRNAs) see the next post on January 25, 2010.

For the anesthesia group, there’s a still better scheduling algorithm.  The results for the surgeon are still good, and it creates incentive for both anesthetists and surgeons to work more efficiently.