When The System Doesn’t Tell The Whole Story: Quantifying OR Supply Management Errors.

This project provides a practical data collection framework for surgical supply picking, documentation, and return to shelves. This template allows users to quantify and categorize reasons for discrepancy between system and physical inventory levels. A manual data collection is needed because information from electronic medical record (EMR) and inventory systems are unreliable as they depend on preference card and supply usage documentation accuracy. Benefits of this approach are: 1. comparing error rates across multiple specialties, surgeons, etc. 2. conducting a root cause analysis, to highlight improvement opportunities and 3. standardizing data collection for a before and after-intervention comparison.

Identifying when system data is unreliable and methods for reliable data collection in this event.

Importance of contextual qualitative information regarding staff sentiment and how it drives the effectiveness of system heavily dependent on human input.

Strategies to foster interdepartmental trust and ownership of solutions.

Authors

MSc Industrial Engineering, Sr. Management Engineer at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Supporting and leading non-labor expense management and process improvement initiatives through data analytics with an emphasis on operating room supply, and hospital inventory management.

Ivy Sousa Lellis is a PMO Director at Mount Sinai Medical Center, Miami Beach, Florida. She earned her Master’s degree in Engineering Management from Florida International University (FIU). Prior work experiences are PI Coordinator, then Project Manager at FIU Health as well as other IE roles in logistics and manufacturing. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Food Engineering from both University of Campinas (Brazil) and AgroParisTech (France). She is an ASQ Six Sigma Black Belt, Florida Sterling examiner, and a previous board member of IISE Greater Miami Chapter.