TORONTO – The Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care will be outfitting Ontario hospitals with a surgical performance feedback service, McKesson’s OR Benchmarks Collaborative, as a part of the Canadian Ministry’s Surgical Targets Program.

The government agency is working to decrease wait times for cancer, cardiac, cataract, hip and knee surgeries, in addition to MRI and CT exams, to make more efficient use out of the hospitals’ resources, according to ministry officials.

Some 80 hospitals and 14 integrated delivery networks will receive access to the service in the next few months. Lorraine Osbourne, a sub-contractor working with the Ontario Ministry of Health, will lead seminars for the selected hospitals’ staff members.

OR Benchmarks Collaborative “brings concrete data, alleviating the question about where the time issues are,” she said. “The whole province is looking at wait time problems. Hospitals are canceling patients every day due to inefficiencies in the operating room.”

The hospital submits the information for as many as 21 categories that include post-operation login, procedure codes and start time accuracy to a Web site customized by McKesson. The hospital can track its performance over time and compare itself with its peers.

“We can drill down to find any operational issues,” said Shannon Reveilia, senior manager for surgery capacity management at McKesson.

OR Benchmarks Collaborative has more than 100 subscribers in the United States and Canada. It was launched in January by McKesson in partnership with OR Manager, a New Mexico-based provider of benchmarking services.

U.S. hospitals are working to improve surgical efficiency as well. Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles uses an OR data management system, which is easier to track hospital efficiency, said M. Michael Shabot, MD, medical director of enterprise information services and surgical intensive care.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” he said. “It is important for hospitals to use optimally very expensive resources such as this (OR data management) technology.”

Since October 2005, the American College of Surgeons has offered a case log system for its members to enter surgical data into their PDAs or via the Web. This includes the procedure, diagnosis and conditions of the surgery.

“It allows the surgeon to compare his or her own cases with peers completely anonymously,” said Shabot, who helped develop the program.