Harvard Business Review last week published a fascinating article that discusses why perioperative team design is often a more decisive factor in surgical success than advanced technology is.
The article was written by Antonio García Romero, assistant professor of healthcare innovation academic director of the Disrupting Healthcare with Generative AI program, and Marco Caserta, assistant professor of operations and business analytics, both of IE Business School in Madrid, Spain.
“As companies in all industries adopt new technologies to assist teams, they should keep in mind that the experiences of the team’s members working with each other in the past still matter a lot,” they write. “A study of surgeries at a mid-sized hospital in Madrid, Spain, reinforced that point and generated other insights into how best to staff teams.”
They write that despite hospitals’ investments in digital tools intended to optimize their ORs, such as dashboards, predictive algorithms, and real-time monitoring systems, “inefficiency persists, duration variability remains high, and performance often differs dramatically from one day to the next or from one team to the next.” Their research, based on more than 77,000 surgeries, found that “a substantial driver of operating room performance is not technology. It is how teams are designed.”
They conclude, “Many hospitals attempt to solve coordination challenges with increasingly sophisticated technology. Our research and field experience suggest that team structure, not technology, is the most powerful lever for improving OR performance. By redesigning how people collaborate, hospitals can achieve meaningful improvements quickly and at minimal cost. Technology can and should support progress. But thoughtful team design is what drives it.”
Take a deep dive into their research and insights into perioperative team design by reading the full article here.
