Benchmarking and Hospital Management Services

Hospital Operating Room Management

Full service management in hospital ambulatory surgeries, insuring efficiency and volume for physicians and a positive patient experience.

These are difficult times for hospitals, especially in the area of out-patient surgery. You have the corporate surgery center chains and the practice management companies pulling your high volume users into joint ventures without you. You even have your own staff developing centers. Even though you may want to develop a freestanding ASC with your physicians – sometimes you just cannot justify the cost. Sometimes you cannot joint venture your surgery with your physicians. What can you do?

Above all else, surgeons want efficiency that a hospital environment just cannot offer to them. They want a 7 am case to start at 7 am and a 10 minute turnaround time between cases. They want to work in a friendly, efficient, streamlined environment. Most hospitals just cannot provide that freestanding efficiency in their current setting. Give us a call, we’ll explain how together we can do it.  Operating Room Leasing

Do you need to lease a single OR suite or the entire center? Leasing a surgery center or hospital HOPD? There is much more to the process than you might realize. How do you know it is the right price? What about the staff? The instrument wear and tear? Does the leasing party need to be credentialed to use the facility? Call us – we know the answers!

“Culture Change” Agents

Most hospitals have developed a “bureaucracy” over the decades that accounts for high cost, surgeon rebellion, and inefficiencies.   Most are not even aware it exists in their organization.  Warning signs include physician surgery center development, cases running later and later into the day, anesthesia problems, and higher and higher overtime paid.  Maybe it is time for a change.

The delivery of surgical services is radically different than it was fifteen, ten, and even five years ago.  These multimillion dollar operating room departments are much more competitive, more expensive to operate, and more time consuming than most managers comprehend.  As a result, it is often human nature for members of the management team to resort to how they managed in the past and focusing their attention on the areas they know best; patient care, and employee moral – while their greatest challenge, the surgeons, are walking out their doors by the hundreds.

The fact that for-profit outpatient surgery centers exist at all is a direct result of hospitals missing the concept of time-efficiency when it comes to their target market – the surgeon.  With over 4,500 surgery centers in existence and 250 current under construction, 100% percent of these centers should be considered missed opportunities for hospitals.  The average operating room managers and directors are typically ill-equipped with the knowledge of cost control, time efficiency, and physician relations to tackle these new management challenges.

The goal of this education program, or “Cultural Change” is to orient senior level staff to the realities of the business side of healthcare.

Project Scope


Earnhart & Associates, Inc. will produce a series of detailed programs that will educate appropriate operating room personnel on how to be competitive in a highly competitive surgery arena.
Earnhart will work with senior personnel of your organization to develop a curriculum that will address the following areas:

  • Physician relationships.

a.  How the surgeon thinks.

b.  What they really are looking for in the operating room.

  • Cost control.

a.  What do things cost?

b.  How can you cost be reduced without reducing the quality of the patient experience?

  • What is the impact of the lost of one surgeon to your OR budget?
  • Establishing benchmarks and applying them in a practical and realistic manner.
  • How to involve anesthesia into a more efficient surgical department without the need for anesthesia subsidize.
  • Setting realistic and achievable performance goals for the department.
  • Incentives for the not-for-profit hospital staff that works.
  • Learning how to evaluate leadership.
  • Developing employee core competencies that are meaningful.
  • Understanding what is meant by “Positive Patient Experience” vs. “Quality of Care.”
  • Why we have to care what the surgeon’s motives are in the operating room.
  • Developing a comprehensive, yet, obtainable, physician disciple in regards to surgical start time.

These are but a few of the topics that will be covered during the year long monthly training sessions.  The faculty will be multi–disciplined and will include an anesthesiologist, an ENT surgeon, an orthopedic surgeon, PACU nurses, OR nurses, business leaders, attorneys, hospital administrators, and other highly experienced personnel of Earnhart & Associates.

The program will pull no punches in the delivery of the message.  It will focus on practical realities and not theory.  The lectures will be held monthly and allow ample time for questions and answers.  It is our firm belief that when you change the way you look at things – the things you look at change.

Benchmarking – One more key to success!

An extensive list of surgical benchmarks that we have collected and maintained over the years.

Earnhart & Associates, Inc has an extensive list of surgical benchmarks that we have collected and maintained over the years.  We are more that willing to share that data free of charge with other professionals.

This is how it works.  Send an email to:  info@earnhart.com with your benchmarks.  We will then send you back like benchmarks that you send us from 5 other like facilities free of charge to compare yourself with.  All benchmarks are 100% confidential!  Your name, facility, or city will never be mentioned in any info sent out.  Remember that the more benchmarks you send us, we will send that many back to you.

You must send us the following information in order for us to process your order:

  • Contact Name:  *Only if we have a question with the information you send in.
  • Email Address:  *Do not worry, we do not sell them or give them out.
  • Facility Size: in rough square footage:  *Very rough is fine.
  • Number of Operating Rooms:
  • Number of Treatment or Procedure Rooms:
  • Number of Cases per year:
  • Number of Procedures Per Year (optional):
  • Type of Specialty or Mix:  *Is the facility a single specialty (which one) or if multi-specialty, which specialties?
  • Type of Ownership:  *MD only, Corporate, Hospital, Joint Venture with either, other
  • For Profit or Not for Profit:
  • City:  *optional
  • State:
  • Zip Code:  *optional

Our goal is to give benchmarks that most clearly match your center with other centers.  For example, if you are wanting to know the turnover time for a MD owned for profit ASC in Kansas with 2 operating rooms and a treatment room doing 3,000 orthopedic cases per year – we can give you those. Plus any other benchmarks your want as long as you send us in the same benchmarks.   Hence the need for the above demographics.