Publications by authors named "William R Furman"
Background: A major restructuring of perioperative care delivery is required to reduce cost while improving patient outcomes. In a test implementation of this notion, we developed and implemented a perioperative consult service (PCS) for colorectal surgery patients.
Methods: A 6-month planning process was undertaken to engage key stakeholders from surgery, nursing, and anesthesia in a healthcare redesign project that resulted in the creation of a PCS to implement a coordinated clinical pathway.
Background: Precise estimates of final operating room demand can only be made 1 or 2 days before the day of surgery, when it is harder to adjust staffing to match demand. The authors hypothesized that the accumulating elective schedule contains useful information for predicting final case demand sufficiently in advance to readily adjust staffing.
Methods: The accumulated number of cases booked was recorded daily, from which a usable dataset comprising 146 consecutive surgical days (October 10, 2011 to May 7, 2012, after removing weekends and holidays), and each with 30 prior calendar days of booking history, was extracted.
Background: Anesthesiology residencies are developing trainee assessment tools to evaluate 25 milestones that map to the six core competencies. The effort will be facilitated by development of automated methods to capture, assess, and report trainee performance to program directors, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and the trainees themselves.
Methods: The authors leveraged a perioperative information management system to develop an automated, near-real-time performance capture and feedback tool that provides objective data on clinical performance and requires minimal administrative effort.